Courses

This is a course designed for graduate students who are interested in media and their connections to religious traditions and practices. This includes a consideration of specific mediums, including books and other printed texts, photography, radio, television, film, and the internet. But there is also an important manner in which media technologies have to be understood not only as these cultural artifacts (radio, film) but also the more elementary senses they express (hearing, sight, etc). We therefore investigate media both as a broad conceptual category and as specific technologies of communication. 

Course texts will include a combination of theoretical works as well as case studies drawn from major religious traditions. The learning goals of the course are: (1) to introduce seminal interpretive and methodological issues in the contemporary study of media/mediation; (2) to study some theoretical classics in the field, to provide a foundation for further reading; (3) to introduce new writing in the field; and (4) to encourage students to think of ways in which the issues and authors surveyed might provide models for their own ongoing research work.