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!
The Departments of Religion at Columbia and Barnard are now welcoming submissions for the second 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.
View the full announcement for submission instructions.
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,…
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…