DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

This course concerns the history, politics, culture and economy of how Islam and Muslims have been represented in the north Atlantic world (the ‘West’). It begins with a brief overview of Western representations of Muslims during the medieval era, then examines how colonialism shaped the modern history and politics of contemporary Islamophobia. The bulk of the course will focus in depth on aspects of Islamophobia in the United States, aiming to empower students to understand and navigate the contemporary context. We will also critically discuss the utility of the term 'Islamophobia'. The course gives particular attention to ways that Muslims have sought to challenge, complicate and subvert how they are represented. The course, finally, also serves as an introduction to the academic study of religion. We will explore several themes in Religious Studies throughout the course, particularly religion and race, religion and politics, religion and law, and religion and media.

Today, the New Testament is widely known and accepted as Christians' authoritative and sacred collection of texts. But roughly two thousand years ago, there were no Christians, and there was no New Testament. Rather, there existed in the eastern part of the Roman Empire a small group of people who had begun worshiping a Jewish healer and teacher as divine. It is this historical moment to which we turn in this course. We will study the people, events, and texts of the first and second centuries that shaped a small Jewish movement into the religion now known as Christianity, using as our main evidence the letters and stories of the New Testament. (Winter 2020, Professor Laura Dingeldein)

Religion and the making of contem-porary America, including Cold War religion, the “Black Gods” of the Great Migration, the rise of the Christian Right, and modern American Catholicism and Judaism. Counts towards Religion, Law and Politics (RLP) major concentration. (Winter 2020, Larry Perry)

This seminar explores the place of the body in Chinese religion, from the ancient period to the present day. In the course of this exploration, we seek to challenge our presuppositions about a seemingly simple question: what is “the body,” and how do we know? We open by considering themes of dying and the afterlife, food and drink, health and medicine, gender and family. We then turn to Daoist traditions of visual culture that envision the human body as intimately connected with the cosmos and picture the body’s interior as a miniature landscape populated by a pantheon of gods. We read ghost stories and analyze the complex history of footbinding. Finally, we conclude with two case studies of religion and the body in contemporary China, one situated on the southwestern periphery, the other in the capital city of Beijing. Throughout the quarter, we investigate how the body has mediated relationships between Buddhist, Daoist, and popular religious traditions. By the course’s end, students will gain key resources for understanding historical and contemporary Chinese culture, and new perspectives on what it means to be religious and embodied. *Counts towards Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) major concentrations. (Winter 2020, Professor Kevin Buckelew) 

The aim of the African American Religious Thought course is to offer students a chance to delve deeply into the ways in which black intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Delores Williams have thought about religion and race in America. Here, students get a grasp of both the primary and secondary sources of African American Intellectual-Religious history, engaging monographs on the subject and major figures in historical moments. Students will leave with an understanding of how African American Intellectuals engaged religious and political matters during chattel slavery, the reconstruction, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Era, and the Black Lives Matter Movement. ( Winter 2020, Professor Larry Perry)

Histories of ‘Religion’: Focusing on recent monographs in the field, this course aims to provide a genealogy of the category of religion itself as it was constituted within Euro-American intellectual and social history. It gives particular attention to ways that the category migrated within, and was mediated by, colonial and imperial networks (with a particular focus on Asia). It ends with an overview of recent debates about secularity as a discourse that attempts to draw boundaries between ‘religion’ and not-religion (‘culture’, ‘politics’, ‘superstition’, and so on), and of ways that the category of religion was/remains imbricated in notions of race. (Winter 2020, Professor Brannon Ingram)