The Department of Religion congratulates Professor Gary Dorrien on the publication of his memoir "Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life” now available from Baylor University Press. Professor Dorrien was recently awarded the Gandhi, King, Mandela Peace Prize at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Gil Anidjar’s latest book, On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal, will be published in November by Columbia University Press. The Press is featuring the book on its website, in a blog post by Professor Anidjar, that picks up on some of the key themes in the book.
Aziza Shanazarova, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion, has a new book out with Cambridge University Press, Female Religiosity in Central Asia: Sufi Leaders in the Persianate World. Through revealing the fascinating story of the Sufi master Aghā-yi Buzurg and her path to becoming the “Great Lady” in sixteenth-century Bukhara, Professor Shanazarova invites readers into the little-known world of female religious authority in early modern Islamic Central Asia, revealing a far more multifaceted gender history than previously supposed. Pointing towards new ways of mapping female religious…
Columbia University Department of Religion Doctoral Student Nanea Renteria has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship for her project "Two Spirits: Gender, Oral History, and the Peyote Way."
Project Abstract:
The Native American Church (NAC) is a pan-Indigenous organization formed in 1918 to protect the religious use of peyote. To make Indigenous religious traditions legible within settler legal regimes, NAC leaders sought First Amendment protections when religious leadership was imagined as an exclusively male domain. Now, in the twenty-first century, women…
The Department of Religion is pleased to announce that Zoe Neuschatz (GS ’25) is the winner of the Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize. Zoe's submission "Eating is Believing: Religious Expression in Countercultural Cookbooks, 1975-1999," was written in Prof. Courtney Bender’s Fall 2023 Theory seminar.
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 Zoe!
Krishna and his world: Jack Hawley's new translation of Surdas published by Harvard University Press
In 2023 Jack Hawley published a paperback volume of translations of poems bearing the name of Surdas that he and, especially, Kenneth Bryant have established as belonging to the 16th century, when Surdas lived. This selection focuses exclusively on Krishna and his world.
As Harvard University Press, the publisher, explains, “The blind poet Surdas has been regarded as the epitome of artistry in Hindi verse from the end of the sixteenth century, when he lived, to the present day. His fame rests upon his remarkable refashioning of the widely known narrative of the Hindu deity Krishna and his…
A Hindu-Jewish Conversation: Root Traditions in Dialogue is a historical, theological, and phenomenological engagement of the Hindu and Jewish traditions, two “root” traditions that give rise to other—in some ways very different—types of religious traditions. Rachel Fell McDermott and Daniel F. Polish explore conceptions of the divine, which are frequently cited as the most serious obstacle to a serious theological engagement between the two traditions; differences in attitude towards heroes, saints, and holy people; the religious resources and challenges experienced by Hindu and Jewish…
This month sees the publication of Gale Kenny’s new book, Christian Imperial Feminism, by NYU Press.
Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism.
Gale L. Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s…
In February, 2023 Rajkamal Prakashan of Delhi published a Hindi translation of Jack Hawley’s 2020 book Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century. The Hindi title is Kṛṣṇa kī Līlābhūmi: 21vīṅ Sadī meṅ Vṛndāvan and the translator is Ashok Kumar. With this, Hawley hopes to make his words and thoughts accessible in the language where many of his interviews and encounters took place. A book launch chaired by Purushottam Agrawal, editor of Rajkamal’s Bhakti Mīmāṃsā series, and mentored by Shrivatsa Goswami, took place in Vrindavan itself.
Vrindavan is the place…
Zehra Mehdi was awarded the 2023 SSRC Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship, to complete the writing of her dissertation, ‘Work of Religion,’ a psychoanalytic ethnography exploring Muslim ethical responses to their persecution under Hindu nationalism.
The Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal (RSDR) Program of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) aims to bring knowledge of the place of religion and spirituality into scholarly and public conversations about renewing democracy in the United States and around the world. This program is offered by the SSRC…
Gaurika Mehta, 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).
In her dissertation, Bearing the Burden of History: Religion and the Minority Ethics of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi Diaspora, Gaurika combines archival and ethnographic research in Guyana, India, and the U.S. to examine the role of religion in the making of the Madrasis—a diasporic community and religious minority formed as a result…
Columbia University Department of Religion PhD Student Khadeeja Majoka has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship from The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
This new program supports doctoral students in the humanities and interpretive social sciences as they pursue bold and innovative approaches to dissertation research. The fellowships are designed to intervene at the formative stage of dissertation development and promote research methodologies, project formats, and areas of inquiry that challenge traditional norms of doctoral education…