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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
The Department of Religion is pleased to announce that Alethea Harnish (CC’24) is the winner of the Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize. Alethea’s submission, an original play titled “The Foundation of Roses” accompanied by oral histories of family change, was written in Professor Mark C. Taylor’s Fall 2020 seminar, “Recovering Place.
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 Alethea!