News
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.
PhD student and psychoanalyst Zehra Mehdi is connecting hundreds of college students across India to mental health practitioner offering free services to help them cope with the stresses of the recent unrest. Read more about Zehra’s incredible work in the Times of India.
Congratulations to Jay Ramesh for successfully defending his dissertation. Jay's dissertation, "Abodes of Śiva," examines the history of the talapurāṇam (literally, "place-lore"), a type of medieval and early modern poem written in the Tamil language which describes the legends associated with Hindu shrines as well as the manner in which rituals at the temple must be conducted. Though such texts as written in Sanskrit are popular throughout South Asia, it was only in the Tamil speaking region that these texts were written as ornate court poetry, drawing from the long history of devotional poetry in that language. Through an analysis of the poetics of these texts, the stories that they narrate, and the historical circumstances surrounding their popularity, he demonstrates how the Tamil talapurāṇams mark a conscious and sustained effort to unite a community of devotees around a set of shrines that existed in South India by appealing to and simultaneously producing the collective memory of a distant past. His current research explores the imagination of the natural world, and of fluvial landscapes specifically, in Sanskrit and Tamil devotional literature.
Matthew Engelke, Professor or Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, is offering a six-week seminar on Magic at the School of Criticism and Theory, at Cornell University this summer. For more information, visit the School of Criticism and Theory.
On January 8th at the India International Centre in Delhi, Jack Hawley launched his new book Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press). The celebrated Hindustani vocalist Shubha Mudgal opened the occasion by singing odes to Vrindavan composed in the sixteenth century, when Vrindavan was built. Purushottam Agrawal, Professor of Hindi Emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University and a well-known commentator on current Indian affairs, officiated. Both he and Hawley spoke about the Muslim-Hindu concordat that made possible the building of Vrindavan—the deeply intertwined fortunes and religious interests of the Mughal emperor Akbar and his chief general, Raja Mansingh.
Krishna’s Playground offers a portrait of massive changes that have overtaken Vrindavan since the century began, turning the pastoral retreat hallowed as the place where Krishna grew up into an extension of megalopolitan Delhi. There’s the rush of real estate development, the utter pollution of the River Yamuna, a galloping culture of religious theme parks, and soon the world’s tallest religious building—seventy stories high. Hawley sees Vrindavan as a symbol and portent of Anthropocene disasters worldwide. He proposes it be protected as a World Heritage Site.
Professor David Kittay's book The Vajra Rosary Tantra is coming out in February, published by Wisdom Publications and the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, distributed by Simon & Schuster. For more information, please visit Amazon or Simon & Shuster.
The Department of Religion is proud to announce the establishment of the annual Peter J. Awn Undergraduate Paper Award. Peter was a treasured colleague and friend who, in addition to serving as Dean of Columbia’s School of General Studies for twenty years, was an active professor of Religion, an erudite scholar of Islam and Islamic mysticism, and a brilliant teacher and mentor. Through his teaching Peter invited countless Columbia students into the modes of thinking, reading, and scholarly questioning that are at the heart of religious studies and of humanistic inquiry.
The Peter J. Awn Undergraduate Paper Award honors our colleague’s deep passion for undergraduate education by awarding $500 each spring to the best undergraduate paper written for a course in the Department of Religion. Further details regarding eligibility requirements and submission guidelines are forthcoming.
Congratulations to second year Doctoral student, Samuel Stella, for the publication of his article, The Second Great Awakening and the Built Landscape of Missouri in the special joint issue of the Journal of the Center for the Material and Visual Culture of Religion and the Journal of Southern Religion.
Congratulations to Yanchen Liu, doctoral student focusing on Christianity, for being awarded the Heckman Stipend by the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. Yanchen will use this stipend to conduct research in the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in January of 2020.
Read the full announcement here: Sciences Po Dedicates Reims Campus Library to Late Dean Emeritus Peter J. Awn
Get to know Professor Josef Sorett a little better by reading his profile in Columbia College Today's Summer 2019 issue.
Congratulations to Mark Balmforth, a doctoral candidate in South Asian Religions, who was awarded the Henry Barnard Prize from the History of Education Society for his article, “A Nation of Ink and Paint: Map Drawing and Geographic Pedagogy in the American Ceylon Mission.” The Barnard Prize is awarded every two years to the best graduate student essay in educational history. Mark’s essay, part of his dissertation “Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon, 1796–1855,” will be published in a forthcoming edition of The History of Education Quarterly.
In this Q&A, Claire Tow Professor of Religion Jack Hawley — unofficially named an honorary citizen of the Braj region of North India earlier this year — discusses India’s religious and cultural landscape.
Click here to read the full discussion.