The Department of Religion is pleased to announce that Lily Conable (BC '23) and Jane McBride (CC ’23) are the joint winners of the 2023 Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize. Lily's paper is titled “Imagining Ancient Textual Lives: Rewriting and Reinterpreting the Provenance of The Thunder: Perfect Mind (NHC VI),” and was written in Professor Najam Haider's Fall 2022 Senior Research Seminar. Jane's paper is titled “Enchanting Writing: The Writer and Her Craft as Inherently Paradoxical,” and was written in Professor Najam Haider's Spring 2023 Senior Research…
Department of Religion PhD student Connor Martini Receives 2023 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student Instructor
The award will be presented during a ceremony at the 2023 GSAS Awards Dinner and Reception, which will be held on Tuesday, June 6, 2023, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., in the Library at Casa Italiana. Past winners can be found here.
In Black is a Church, Josef Sorett maps the ways in which black American culture and identity have been animated by a particular set of Protestant ideas and practices in order to chart the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity essential to the very notion of blackness. In doing so, Sorett reveals the ways that Christianity, white supremacy, and colonialism coalesced in the modern category of "religion" and became formative to the emergence of black identity in North America. Black is a Church examines the surprising alliances,…
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 Friday, March 24 at 5 p.m. Prize will be announced in mid-April.
Eligibility: Submissions must be
- between 10-25 pages in length…
Department of Religion PhD Candidate Zehra Mehdi has been nominated in the global inspiration list of 100 Indian Muslim women in North America under the category of youth inspiration with a cutting edge approach to PhD research for her dissertation: The ‘work of Religion’: Trauma, Mourning and Political Resistance in the lives of Muslims in ‘Old Lucknow’.
https://www.inspiringindianmuslimwomen.org/global-inspirations-north-america
Rev. Dr. Garry Dorien’s book American Democratic Socialism has won the American Library Association’s Choice Award. This is the third time he has won this award. Previous times were for Social Ethics in the Making and for Breaking White Supremacy. The Choice Award “reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.”
Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien shared, “I am grateful to the American Library Association for this wonderful honor. The book was a labor of love. Writing it was…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…