Congratulations to Professor Bernard Faure for being named a member of the 2020 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.