Courses

This course examines the role of media in shaping religious identities, beliefs, practices, and institutions using case studies from American history and contemporary American culture. For the purpose of this course, the term media will be interpreted broadly to mean any technique or technology designed to communicate information such as verbal discourses, written texts, visual representations, ritual gestures, sacred objects, and telecommunication technologies. In foregrounding media, we will examine how religious beliefs and practices have been remembered, disseminated, translated, and contested in the American context. Just as important, we will examine how religious groups have negotiated their American identity through media practices and their narrative content.

As we will see, acts of transmission such as writing, mapping, broadcasting, and televising play essential parts in drawing and erasing communal boundaries from both within and without. With this in mind, we will not be attempting to identify what religion is, so much as the ways in which historical actors understood themselves to be religious. We will find that what counts as religion varies, sometimes dramatically, across times, spaces, and cultures; “America” is similarly unstable and contested. Our job, then, will be to understand the role of media and mediation in constituting their contours.