DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

1. Animality, Monstrosity, and Transformation;
2. Demons, Golems, and Jinn;
3. Magic and Necromancy; and
4. Death and Crossing Over.

Each unit will feature selections of medieval literature and art, as well works of media that interpret the middle ages (Monty Python and the Holy Grail; The Seventh Seal) or illuminate the endurance of these themes in the modern world (Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video, episodes of Stranger Things, scenes from The Matrix). Drawing on secondary readings and short lectures, we will explore this material from a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, including queer theory, disability theory, and race theory. Students will each produce a creative final project that draws on medieval sources and modern media to explore how the strange, the supernatural, and the macabre can be used to circumscribe and demonize particular groups; or how they can be used radically and subversively by marginalized communities as they work to thrive in strange, hostile worlds. Counts towards Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) religious studies major concentration.

(Fall 2022, Dr. Ashley King)
About half of LGBTQ+ Americans identify as religious, though their stories may be less familiar to us than stories of religious oppression and acrimony. Today, conservative religious institutions lead the opposition to LGBTQ+ rights and provide the public framework for discrimination against queer people. Is religion homophobic and transphobic? Does it have to be?

This course explores how queer religious people in America, past and present, have made sense of their lives as queer and religious. We will ask how religion has shaped queer people’s self-understanding as queer, and how queerness has shaped their understanding of faith through their stories of coming out, conversion, transition, diaspora, desire, loss, and healing from spiritual trauma. We will identify the many contributions queer people have made to American religious history—sometimes while hiding their rainbow under a bushel.

Course materials comprise multiple genres of academic writing (history, theory, theology, ethnography, and cultural criticism) and popular media (memoir, fiction, film, podcasts, music, and social media), drawn from Native American religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Haitian Vodou, and New Age spiritualities like tarot and astrology. Instruction will focus on developing critical thinking, reading, and writing skills through familiarizing first-year students with basic research methods and strategies designed to prepare them for college-level research in any humanities field.

(Winter 2023, Professor Elizabeth Shakman Hurd)
This course is a study of the American border, past and present. We pay special attention to the history of the U.S. border with Mexico, indigenous communities, law and the border, sovereignty, and the cultural, environmental, and religious politics of the borderlands. We consider border issues from multiple perspectives, including but going beyond issues of surveillance and enforcement. As a first-year seminar, this course also emphasizes critical research and writing skills to prepare you for college-level research and writing. You are strongly encouraged to consult a peer tutor at the Writing Place (writingplace@northwestern.edu). We will discuss academic integrity and get tips from a librarian on how to make the most of the library's resources during your time at Northwestern.

(Spring 2023, Dr. Lily Stewart)
Afterlives and Living After: Envisioning Other Worlds:
Humans for thousands of years have documented their visions of other worlds and afterlives. Whether informed by religious revelation, collective trauma, or individual creativity, these visions provide important vantage points for assessing cultural values and experiences. In this class we will explore religious models of “The Afterlife” while also analyzing afterlives constructed in fiction, film, art, and other forms of popular media. We will ask how envisioning other worlds can help us to alternately articulate and blur the boundaries between life and death, trauma and healing, past and present, and reality and fiction. We will also explore what it means to “live after” major ruptures in individual and collective experience. For instance, how do we envision life after pandemic? After climate change? Revolution? Immigration? Utopia? Through speculative fiction, how to we envision the afterlives of humanity as we assess the potential for a post-human world?

Sources will include ghost stories from around the world, medieval visions of hell, purgatory, and heaven, videos of dead celebrities resurrected as holograms, episodes of Upload, The Good Place, and Star Trek, contemporary news releases, and short speculative fiction. Students will develop skills in analytical writing, creative thinking, and classroom collaboration.

(Winter 2023, Professor Michelle Molina)
Religion: we think we recognize it when we see it, and yet it is always changing. How does one study a moving target? In the first weeks of the course, we look back in time to understand how the ideas about religion that are familiar to us today are rooted in history. The emergence of the concept of "religion" as an object of comparison and study grew out of early modern European sectarian violence and colonial overseas expansion. We then turn to study some thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries who developed theories about the best ways to study religion. These scholars developed and honed the fields of sociology, anthropology, and psychology by testing their methods on case studies about religion. To know this history is to know our present, as well as to understand the methodologies that shape the university curriculum. What do we do with this legacy? Are these methods adequate to understanding religion today? In the second half of this class, we critically evaluate these methods by putting them to work to analyze religion in the world, both past and present. We will focus on how religion moves people. People are rooted in space and place by their religious practices, while simultaneously being moved by religion. As will have become clear in the first half of the course, religion is a moving target because people themselves do not stay the same. Throughout the course, we track the tension between rootedness and mobility by examining three themes: "conversion," "borderlands," and "death/afterlives."

(Summer 2024, Professor Michelle Molina)
Religion: we think we recognize it when we see it, and yet it is always changing. How does one study a moving target? In the first weeks of the course, we look back in time to understand how the ideas about religion that are familiar to us today are rooted in history. The emergence of the concept of "religion" as an object of comparison and study grew out of early modern European sectarian violence and colonial overseas expansion. We then turn to study some thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries who developed theories about the best ways to study religion. These scholars developed and honed the fields of sociology, anthropology, and psychology by testing their methods on case studies about religion. To know this history is to know our present, as well as to understand the methodologies that shape the university curriculum. What do we do with this legacy? Are these methods adequate to understanding religion today? In the second half of this class, we critically evaluate these methods by putting them to work to analyze religion in the world, both past and present. We will focus on how religion moves people. People are rooted in space and place by their religious practices, while simultaneously being moved by religion. As will have become clear in the first half of the course, religion is a moving target because people themselves do not stay the same. Throughout the course, we track the tension between rootedness and mobility by examining three themes: "conversion," "borderlands," and "death/afterlives." 

(Fall 2022, Professor Sarah Taylor)
Dive into one of today’s most exciting and rapidly growing areas of scholarship – the intriguing entanglements of religion and media in society and culture. This course draws from an array of sources, such as television, film, and radio, digital gaming worlds, billboards, advertisements and media campaigns, popular music, streaming video, social media, and even tattoos, body art, and graffiti. Study media while getting to make your own media for course projects!

(Spring 2023, Professor Sarah Taylor)
Dive into one of today’s most exciting and rapidly growing areas of scholarship – the intriguing entanglements of religion and media in society and culture. This course draws from an array of sources, such as television, film, and radio, digital gaming worlds, billboards, advertisements and media campaigns, popular music, streaming video, social media, and even tattoos, body art, and graffiti. Study media while getting to make your own media for course projects!

(Summer 2024, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)
This course attempts to answer the questions "What is Judaism?" and "Who is a Jew?" by surveying the broad arc of Jewish history, reviewing the practices and beliefs that have defined and continue to define Judaism as a religion, sampling the vast treasure of Jewish literatures, and analyzing the unique social conditions that have made the cultural experience of Jewishness so significant. The class will employ a historical structure to trace the evolutions of Jewish literature, religion, and culture through the ages.

(Fall 2022, Professor Sarah Jacoby)
The unifying theme of this seminar is gender and Buddhism. We take as our point of departure Carolyn Bynum's statement: "No scholar studying religion, no participant in ritual, is ever neuter. Religious experience is the experience of men and women, and in no known society is this experience the same." Bearing this in mind, we will explore historical, textual and social questions relevant to gender in the Buddhist worlds of India, Tibet, and the Himalayas from the time of Buddhism's origins to the present day. Topics covered in this course will include the roles of women, men, femininity, and masculinity in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhism and the family, gender and the body in Mahayana Buddhism, the roles of female goddess figures such as dakinisin Vajrayana Buddhism, Buddhism and sexuality, and the status of Buddhist nuns. Counts towards Religion, Sexuality, and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentration.

(Winter 2023, Professor Antonio Terrone)
This course investigates the intersections between religion and violence in the context of Buddhist Asia while also considering why in many religious traditions there seem to be a link between the two. The course will be structured in two parts: in the first part students will be encouraged to build expertise in the basic concepts, definitions, and general academic consensus (as well as debates) about categories including “religion,” “violence,” “sacrifice,” “ritual,” “martyrdom,” and also “nationalism,” “politics,” and “terrorism” through reading both primary sources (in English translation) and secondary sources (scholarly writings). We will then move into an analysis of case studies that focus on specific circumstances where Buddhist rhetoric, scriptural authority, and religious practices have played a role in violence including suicide, terrorist-related actions, and self-immolation predominantly in pre- and modern Asia.

Some of the provocative questions that this course asks include: Why and how is religion involved in politics? Is Buddhism a pacifist religion? How does religion rationalize violence? How can some Buddhist leaders embrace terror as a political tool? Are the recent practices of self-immolation in Tibet acts of violence? Can non-violence be violent?

Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.

(Spring 2023, Dr. Ariel Schwartz)
This course offers an in-depth study of the concept of “sacred space,” engaging American Judaism for its case study repertoire. Rather than thinking broadly and linearly about the history of American Judaism, we will consider: What is sacred space? What makes or unmakes sacred space? How have sacred spaces shaped American Judaism, and how has American Judaism contributed to the formation of American sacred space? We will map the topography of American Jewish sacred spaces, both literal and conceptual, and we will consider the effects of American laws, practices, and norms on Jewish communities. As a central component of the course, students will craft their own “site biography,” acquiring first-hand experience conducting ethnographic and historical research. Students will gain a critical understanding of “sacred space” as an academic construct and learn how Judaism uniquely germinated in American soil.

(Summer 2024, Marlon Millner)
A religious interpretation of the Black and Africana experience in the United States can be examined through three themes: Recognition by or rejection of the U.S.; the meaning of Africa or Blackness for Black and Africana religions; and the binary of sacred versus secular in Black and Africana religions. African American religion has been marked by the tension created by inclusion and exclusion. Throughout the history of the Black Atlantic, Black religious movements emerged that sought greater acceptance and inclusion in U.S. life. Other Black religious movements, by contrast, developed their identities and practices based on a rejection of American identity.

One of the primary drivers of these distinctions in Black and Africana continues to be the question of what the “African” in religion and African American life means. Some unique movements, both Christian and Islamic, or what are called African Traditional Religions, have sought to define or retrieve an African cultural past for current religious practices. The term “African” pertains not only to debates and differences in highlighting a cultural past tied to the continent of Africa; it also refers to religion in the United States that is constantly reformed by the movement and migration of people groups.

Finally, the category of religion itself is at stake, as more and more Black and diasporic persons embrace labels like humanist, spiritual-but-not-religious, and not affiliated (or nones). These nontheistic and non-institutional labels open up forms of African American religiosity that embrace the practices and rituals of African American religions, but often for symbolic, cultural, or artistic reasons, do not demand adherence to these pre- scribed rituals, belief in a particular set of doctrines, or a commitment to certain communities of practice.

What is the relationship between African Americans, Diaspora and Religion? The categories of religion and race emerge within the encounter between Europeans and Africans in New World conquest and enslavement. This suggests geography, conflict, and the entanglement and or emergence of cultures offer a story of religion in spatial, relational and temporal ways. This course will trace religion as a mapping of space, a motion of time and a making sense of encounter of Black movement. Black Diaspora, a religious interpretation will therefore examine key words, or themes, such as: SOUL, SPIRIT, AFRICA, FREEDOM, SONG and more in a multi-sensory exploration of sound, sight, texts, tastes, ritual, resistance and more. This course will use readings, music, visual art and videos.

(Spring 2023, Professor Sarah Taylor)
When motivating public moral engagement in climate crisis, are the solutions being offered those that the planet will actually “register” or “notice” on a global scale? If not, what kinds of “media interventions” do we need to be making and how? Course content will include discussion of media interventions as moral interventions, media activism for social change, eco-media responses by religious communities and organizations, participatory digital culture, and the challenges of addressing environmental crisis in the distraction economy and what has been called the “post-truth era.” Students will have the opportunity to learn by doing, proposing and crafting their own environmental media interventions as the course’s final project. Counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) major concentration.

(Fall 2022, Prof. Dennis Meade)
The Caribbean constitutes a unique space to understand the history of resistance and social change in the Black Atlantic world. Going beyond the tropes of reggae, Rastafari, and tourism--this course provides an introduction to the diversity of religious traditions in the region, with a particular focus on Afro-Caribbean religious practices and spiritual technologies. Students will explore the cosmological features and embodied expressions that characterize these traditions. Through presentations, discussions, and writing assignments students will reflect on concepts such as belonging, migration, colonialism, race, class, and gender to understand the political and cultural implications of religion in the region. Counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) major concentration.

(Winter 2023, Professor Michelle Molina)

In this course, students will be asked to begin with a case study among the many refugee and migration crises that have dominated the news cycle in recent years. In developing individual research projects, we will foreground different methodological approaches: 1) To move beyond journalism, we will conduct primary and secondary historical research to understand the complex historical roots of the particular case study). 2) We will analyze and practice forms of ethnographic writing to help students better situate and describe the lived experience of migration and exile, both past and present. 3) We will also pay attention to various forms of media, whether print culture, sound, or visual media, to interrogate but also experiment with contemporary modes of narrating and conveying human experience in the digital age.

Students are required to petition for permission to enroll in the class. Your brief statement should include: Your name, your major(s), one short paragraph on the reason why you have an interest in honing your research skills in the direction of the digital humanities, and second short paragraph on a topic about migration and exile that motivates your desire to do further research on the topic. Attach a recent news item (article or video) about the topic that drives your interests. This will help me organize our first sessions in Winter Quarter.

Our work in class will be collaborative, thus a key prerequisite is that you are mature and self-motivated. You do not need to have prior research experience, but you need to demonstrate a desire to dig into your topic and hone your ability to write deeply informed, rigorous, and nuanced arguments and to think about creative ways to bring that rigorous detail to visual story-telling.

*Counts towards Religion, Law and Politics (RLP) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) major concentrations.

(Winter 2023, Professor Robert Orsi and Professor Christine Helmer)
This course explores the central place the concept of “religion” has occupied in the development of critical theory and, in turn, the role critical theory has played in reframing “religion” in modernity and in the contemporary geopolitical moment. We take up the question, “Is critique secular,” as we consider the contributions, potential and actual, of “religion” to social transformation.

(Winter 2023, Brannon Ingram)
This course offers a critical examination of scholars – the Comparative Religions “canon” – who played major roles in the formation of Religious Studies as a discipline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course begins by interrogating the very notion of a canon. What is a canon for? How do they get formed? For what purpose and by whom? Are they still relevant? Can we form new canons? We then proceed to approach the “canon” through a series of modules, focusing on the work, legacies, and scholarly interlocutors of William James, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Mircea Eliade.

(Winter 2023, Prof. Sarah Jacoby)
Feminist Theory and the Study of Religion
This course aims to put feminist theory and religious studies into conversation with each other in order to examine the resulting intersections, points of mutual illumination, and aporias. The course will investigate the history of feminist approaches to religious studies as well as new directions in current scholarship including black feminist and womanist theologies, goddess feminism, postcolonial and transnational feminisms, and secular and post-secular feminisms. We will consider the following questions: What does it mean to apply a gender studies lens to the study of religion? How do feminist conceptions of “liberation” reinforce or reject religious conceptions of “liberation”? How does taking religion seriously transform feminist theory? And how does taking feminist theory seriously transform research practices, subjects, archives, and methods in religious studies? In thinking through these topics, we will (re)read some feminist classics as well as focus on a selection of significant recent works important for students of feminist theory and religious studies. This course seeks to move beyond prevalent assumptions of Judeo-Christian normativity in its analysis of feminist contributions to the study of religion. It pays particular attention to feminist approaches to the study of Asian religions, but with flexibility to highlight other geographic/thematic areas of interest to graduate students enrolled in the course.