News

Ilona Gerbakher has won the 2020-2021 Fulbright Award to Morocco, in order to undertake ethnographic fieldwork for a portion of her dissertation entitled, "Medieval Texts, Modern Tellings: Medieval Sufi Handbooks and the formation of the Moroccan Sufi Self." 

There is perhaps nothing more central to the history of race and racism in the modern world than the diverse set of ideas, institutions and practices that are brought together under the name of “religion.” In truth, it is impossible to think about religion without already thinking about race. This is as true today as it ever was.

Read this brilliant and insightful piece from PhD-alum Benjamin Fong on racial justice and education -- an important reminder that the work of promoting racial justice does not end in the classroom: Teaching Racial Justice Isn’t Racial Justice

Congratulations to Mark Balmforth for successfully defending his dissertation, Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon, 1795–1855. In addition to this incredible milestone, Dr. Balmforth was awarded the University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2020-2021 and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2021–2023.

The Department of Religion endorses the Statement of Principles for Teaching in the Time of a Pandemic, which was originally published by the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Statement of Principles for Teaching in the Time of a Pandemic
As the University’s response to the COVID-19 public health emergency evolves, all of us look forward to returning to the in-person teaching that forms the foundation of our shared intellectual life, when it is safe to do so. During this extraordinary time of crisis, we come together as a community—of scholars, teachers, archivists, students, and administrators—to affirm the following principles, which shall guide our response and our actions going forward:

Health
First and foremost, we commit to preserving the health, safety, and well-being of all members of our community.

Equity
We recognize especially the challenges faced by our students, particularly those already in difficult circumstances shaped by the inequities of wealth, race, ability, accessibility, environment, citizenship, or residency status.

Teaching Flexibility
Therefore, we are committed to adapting our teaching approaches flexibly in response to the varied circumstances and the needs of our students, as well as the ongoing developments in public health, using every tool at our disposal.

Technology
While technological innovation in the classroom is important, we are reluctant to burden our instructors and students with new, cumbersome, and costly tools. Instead, we propose to innovate the methods that are the core of the humanities classroom – careful reading, analysis, original thought, and student engagement -- being guided by best practices and by technology already in use widely among instructors and students. In doing so, we draw upon the rich resources and research in digital humanities pedagogy.

Individual Choice
We trust in the wisdom of instructors to tailor their instruction individually and to make personal choices about how best to preserve the safety of their classes while maintaining teaching excellence.

Self-governance
In making decisions we rely also on the long-standing traditions and established mechanisms of faculty self-governance at Columbia, within the Department and across the Arts and Sciences. Our decisions as a University grow stronger when we respond, with many diverse voices, after careful consideration and discussion, and with respect to the existing advisory structures.

Vulnerability
Finally, we affirm the need to protect our more vulnerable colleagues from undue pressure contrary to the above principles: lecturers, staff, untenured faculty, graduate students, and adjunct faculty. We stand with them in support and with all others struggling to cope with this crisis.

Today, more than ever, our (real and virtual) doors are open for your questions, concerns, and comments. Please do not hesitate to get in touch.

See Professor Ewing's new book, co-edited with Rosemary C. Corbett:

Modern Sufis and the State: The Politics of Islam in South Asia and Beyond. Columbia University Press, 2020.

Please join us in congratulating the Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice (CARSS), headed by religion professor Josef Sorett, for receiving one of only four grants aimed at addressing the intersection of religion and theology with spiritual care, racial diversity, democracy, and technology from the Henry Luce Foundation.

CARSS is conducting an interdisciplinary project that seeks to bring Black studies and the study of religion into dialogue with one another to better understand the meaning of “Black Faith” today.

Congratulations to Josef Sorett on his promotion to full professor effective July 1, 2020! Also effective July 1, 2020, Wayne Proudfoot and Robert Somerville will retire and be honored with the designations of Professor Emeritus of Religion and Tremaine Professor Emeritus of Religion, respectively! Please join the Department of Religion in congratulating our colleagues and thanking Professors Proudfoot and Somerville for their remarkable years of service.

Congratulations to Manpreet Kaur, for receiving the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship 2020, awarded by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Manpreet's research centers on the figure of Baba Farid (d. 1265 CE), a vernacular Sufi Shaikh of the Punjab region who is venerated across Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh religious groups of present day north-western India, and whose presence is recorded across the textual repositories and performance repertoires of each of these religious communities. Her dissertation, "A Performance History of Farid", uncovers and explains the labor of performance in the collation and transmission of sacred texts and the relationship of this process to the coalescence of vernacular devotional communities in early modern south Asia (14th-18th centuries). By illustrating this network of historical actors and activities within the comparative frame of the early development of religious groups like the Sikhs, Hindu Dadupanthis, and Chishti Sufis, it becomes evident that reciprocal collaboration and public co-existence were normal—- not the exceptional phenomena that they are often presented as in contemporary historiography. What is exceptional is the imprint of this collaborative literary and performative output on the social memory of the region of greater Punjab— a geographic, linguistic, cultural zone now split between the modern nation-states of Pakistan and India. The dissertation closes with recording present-day attempts to suture back this memory, in contemporary post-partitioned east Punjab, where invented festivals and residual ritual practices commemorate this shared history.

Congratulations to Zachary Domach for receiving the 2019-2020 Core Preceptor Award for Teaching Excellence in Literature Humanities!

Congratulations to Professor Josef Sorett on being awarded the 2020 Provost’s Grants Program for Mid-Career Faculty Who Contribute to the Diversity Goals of the University which is a key component of Columbia’s ongoing commitment to our core values of inclusion and excellence. Josef’s award is for his project on "Religion and Music in African American Life Since the 1960s."

Congratulations to Professor Bernard Faure for being named a member of the 2020 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Department of Religion is pleased to announce that Grace Holleman (BC’21) is the winner of the Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize. Grace’s paper is titled “Imperio, Impressibility, and Imperialism: Mesmerism and Social Control,” and was written in Professor Matthew Engelke’s Spring 2019 course “Magic and Modernity."  

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

Congratulations to Grace! 

Gary Dorrien expounds in this book the religious philosophy underlying his many magisterial books on modern theology, social ethics, and political philosophy. His constructive position is liberal-liberationist and post-Hegelian, reflecting his many years of social justice activism and what he calls "my dance with Hegel." Hegel, he argues, broke open the deadliest assumptions of Western thought by conceiving being as becoming and consciousness as the social-subjective relation of spirit to itself; yet his white Eurocentric conceits were grotesquely inflated even by the standards of his time. Dorrien emphasizes both sides of this Hegelian legacy, contending that it takes a great deal of digging and refuting to recover the parts of Hegel that still matter for religious thought.

Ph.D. student Rohini Shukla writes about B. R. Ambedkar's study of religion and related fields at Columbia University in the 1910's. Drawing on her archival research at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, she shows how ideas and debates about primitivity, gender, and social evolution shaped Ambedkar's earliest writings on caste--'Castes in India: their Mechanisms, Genesis, and Development.' Read her full article in Borderlines.