News

Kit Hermanson and Sarah Hedgecock have been selected to join the 2023 cohort of American Examples, a program at the University of Alabama that supports early-career scholars of religion in America to develop writing and research, pedagogy, and public scholarship. Kit is a PhD candidate in North American Religions and is writing their dissertation on nonbinary religious figures of the 19th-century United States. Sarah is also a PhD candidate in North American Religions, and her dissertation investigates nostalgia and evangelical girlhood.

The Abyss or Life is Simple: Reading Knausgaard Writing Religion

by Courtney Bender, Jeremy Biles, Liane Carlson, Joshua Dubler, Hannah C. Garvey, M. Cooper Harriss, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and Erik Thorstensen

Min kamp, or My Struggle, is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the novel presents an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a writer with the same name as the author, in a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted.

In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of My Struggle. Some were interested in Knausgaard’s attention to explicitly religious subjects and artworks, others to what they saw as more diffuse attention to the religiousness of contemporary life. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor—a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.

Nos Apocalypses

In her recently published book, Nos Apocalypses, a finalist for the 2022 Prix Medicis, Clémence Boulouque surveys religious responses to epidemics, from Exodus to the coronavirus, and of literary descriptions of diseases, from Boccacio and Goethe to Camus and Octavia Butler. Functioning as social criticism, scriptures and literary texts allow us to engage with questions of collective guilt, collective mourning, and divine justice (or the lack thereof), and to grapple with the societal disruptions, persecution, and discriminations that illnesses create or expose. While some of the parallels with our current times are obvious, these texts also help us to nuance responses to past epidemics and to read them anew. Nos Apocalypses is thus an invitation to understand scriptures as literature and to contemplate the uses of religious imagination in order to ponder what brings us together when disaster strikes. 

Professor Boulouque’s book developed from her 2020 undergraduate course From Exodus to Coronavirus.

Professor Boulouque will be speaking about the book at Maison Francaise on November 16 at 6 p.m. - click here to register for this in person event.

A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life, by Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor

In a time of plague, fundamental questions become immediate and personal. The pandemic, droughts, floods, fire, political violence: the world has been grimly reminded of the proximity and inevitability of death. Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor—acclaimed public intellectuals and scholars of religion, one a Christian and the other an atheist, close friends for fifty years—have spent their lives grappling with questions of ultimate concern. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, locked down at home and facing an uncertain future, Miles and Taylor embarked on an extended conversation about living and dying in an imperiled world.

Read an interview with Professor Taylor here

Please join us for a discussion with Aziza Shanazarova, author of Manifestations of a Sufi Woman in Central Asia. The Maẓhar al-ʿajāʾib is, as of today, the only known extensive treatise devoted to a female religious master in Islamic Central Asia. It is a devotional work written to expound upon the teachings of Aghā-yi Buzurg, (“The Great Lady”), who was active in early 16th century Bukhara. Not only does the Maẓhar al-ʿajāʾib provide information for understanding the religious history of 16th century Central Asia, but it also serves as an important source for the study of female religiosity and gender history in early modern Central Asia. This lecture will discuss the recently published critical edition of the Maẓhar al-ʿajāʾib and its overall importance for the study of gender history in Muslim societies. Moderated by Valentina Izmirlieva, Director of the Harriman Institute. This event is part of a Director’s Seminar series, which allows new Harriman faculty members to introduce their research to both colleagues and students across disciplinary and departmental divides.

Aziza Shanazarova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where she specializes on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and the broader Persianate world with an emphasis on the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. She holds a dual PhD in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies, which she completed at Indiana University-Bloomington in 2019. Before joining Columbia University, Aziza served as a UCIS/REEES Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh and taught at Stanford University.

Harriman Institute
Friday, October 14th, 2022 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room, 1219 International Affairs Building420 W 118th Street, 12th floor New York, NY 10027 United States

Event Details/Registration: https://harriman.columbia.edu/event/manifestations-of-a-sufi-woman-in-central-asia/

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Mohit Kaycee for receiving two competitive fellowships for his fieldwork research. He received the 2022-23 International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) awarded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The IDRF fellowship is funded by the Mellon Foundation and supports doctoral students conducting dissertation research on non-US or US Indigenous cultures and societies around the world. He has also been awarded the 2022 American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Junior Fellowship. Both these fellowships will support Mohit to conduct research on his project: 'Imprints of Place and Memory: Dalit Pedagogy and the Quest for Re-habitation in Rural Karnataka'.

Josef Sorett, Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion, has been appointed as the next Dean of Columbia College and Vice President of Undergraduate Education, effective July 1, 2022.

The Department of Religion is pleased to announce that Natalie Cimino (GS’22) is the recipient of the 2022 Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize. Natalie’s submission, a chapter of her senior honors thesis, “AI Am Just LIke You,” which explores the shifting boundary between the human and the posthuman through an engagement with the humanoid robot BINA48.  Taking as her point of departure a consideration of the religious of contemporary Transhumanism, she probes fundamental questions that increasingly Artificial Intelligence raises about human consciousness and the seemingly endless search for immortality.

The Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize was established by the Department of Religion in 2019, to honor the memory of our colleague and his commitment to undergraduate education, and is awarded annually. 

Congratulations to Natalie! 

Congratulations to sixth year PhD student Zehra Mehdi for being awarded the 2021-2022 International Psychoanalytical Association research grant for her project, The 'Work of Religion': Trauma, Mourning, and Political Resistance. Her dissertation is a psychoanalytic exploration of the ways in which Muslims, as persecuted religious minorities in India, articulate their oppression at the hands of the Hindu nationalist regime. Conducting extensive ethnographic fieldwork (2019-2021) in North India (old lucknow, Uttar Pradesh) with Muslims during nation-wide protests against the citizenship amendment act (CAA), her dissertation  explores the ways in which Muslims actively use religion to pursue the psychic work of making sense of their traumatic experiences, and mourning their losses; this further allows them to reject the projective identifications of the persecutory nation-state, and thereby refuse their ‘political othering’ by demanding the recognition of their reality as equals.

The Departments of Religion at Columbia and Barnard are now welcoming submissions for the third annual Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize. This prize of $500 will be given to the best paper written by an undergraduate for any course or seminar in Religion in the year prior.

This prize honors our colleague Peter Awn’s inspired teaching and his dedication to promoting and celebrating creative inquiry.

Submissions will be accepted until Tuesday, March 22 at 5 p.m. The Prize will be announced in mid-April.

Submissions must be

• between 10-25 pages in length (excluding cover page and bibliography/references), or a creative project of similar effort.
• written for a Spring 2021 or Fall 2021 course in Religion (Columbia and Barnard courses included)
• authored by an undergraduate currently enrolled in any college (GS, Columbia, Barnard, SEAS)

More information and details about how to submit can be found on the Department website at this link

The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life is pleased to announce a master class for students in the Columbia University community on the topic of Indigenous Environmental Justice: Transforming Sustainability, Empowering Climate Action. The master class will be run by Kyle Powys Whyte, Professor of Environment and Sustainability and George Willis Pack at the University of Michigan.

The Department of Religion respects the right of students to collectively bargain, including to strike, and will not retaliate in any way against graduate students who choose to strike. The department will neither report nor provide the names of anyone who participates in the strike.

Regardless of whether one participates in the strike, the faculty in the Department of Religion are committed to continuing to support and advise all of our students in pursuing their own research and in progressing towards completion of their degree.

American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory
By Gary Dorrien

Democratic socialism is ascending in the United States as a consequence of a widespread recognition that global capitalism works only for a minority and is harming the planet’s ecology. This history of American democratic socialism from its beginning to the present day interprets the efforts of American socialists to address and transform multiple intersecting sites of injustice and harm.

Comprehensive, deeply researched, and highly original, this book offers a luminous synthesis of secular and religious socialisms, detailing both their intellectual and their organizational histories.

Learn more and purchase American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory (Yale University Press | Amazon).

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of 16 books ranging across the fields of social theory, ethics, theology, philosophy, politics, and intellectual history.

“Gary Dorrien is the greatest theological ethicist of the twenty-first century, our most compelling political theologian, and one of the most gifted historians of ideas in the world. His American Democratic Socialism is a work of astonishing erudition. Best of all, Dorrien is not only a searing chronicler of prophetic thought, but also a bold Christian participant in the historic quest for social justice.”
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON, 
author of Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America

“American Democratic Socialism is a brilliant and timely book. Dorrien offers a big, ambitious, synthetic political and intellectual history of the whole American democratic socialist tradition, giving particular attention to religious socialists, the centrality of race in American politics, and the intellectual contributions of women.”
GEOFFREY KURTZ,
author of Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social  Democracy

“Dorrien is supremely qualified for the task he has set himself in this very thoughtful, necessary, and timely book.”
MAURICE ISSERMAN,
author of The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington

Erez DeGolan, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Religion at Columbia University, has been named a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation).

Erez’s dissertation, Affect in Power: Public Joy in Roman Palestine and the Lived Experience of the Rabbis, explores how ancient Jews’ engagement with public joy shaped their negotiation of Roman imperialism in the early Common Era, thus suggesting that the ways in which religious minorities navigate systems of power cannot be understood separately from the affective realms of their lived experience.

The Newcombe Fellowship is the nation’s largest and most prestigious award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values. 

The full press release can be found on the Citizens & Scholars' website.

Congratulations to third year PhD student Rohini Shukla for being awarded the competitive 2021-2022 Fulbright U.S. student award to do field research in India.