News

This month sees the publication of Gale Kenny’s new book, Christian Imperial Feminism, by NYU Press.

Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism.

Gale L. Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s missionary movement to create a Christian world order. She shows that this Christian imperial feminism marked a break from an earlier Protestant worldview that focused on moral and racial purity and in which interactions among races were inconceivable. This new approach actually prioritized issues like civil rights and racial integration, as well as the uplift of women, though the racially diverse world Christianity it aspired to was still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered, with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians. In exposing these dynamics, this book departs from recent scholarship on white evangelical nationalism to focus on the racial politics of white religious liberalism. Christian Imperial Feminism adds a necessary layer to our understanding of religion, gender, and empire.

https://nyupress.org/9781479825530/christian-imperial-feminism/

Zehra Mehdi was awarded the 2023 SSRC Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship, to complete the writing of her dissertation, ‘Work of Religion,’ a psychoanalytic ethnography exploring Muslim ethical responses to their persecution under Hindu nationalism.

The Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal (RSDR) Program of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) aims to bring knowledge of the place of religion and spirituality into scholarly and public conversations about renewing democracy in the United States and around the world. This program is offered by the SSRC Program on Religion and the Public Sphere with the support and partnership of the Fetzer Institute.

Gaurika Mehta, 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).

In her dissertation, Bearing the Burden of History: Religion and the Minority Ethics of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi Diaspora, Gaurika combines archival and ethnographic research in Guyana, India, and the U.S. to examine the role of religion in the making of the Madrasis—a diasporic community and religious minority formed as a result of colonial forced migration and indentured labor. Her project lies at the intersection of three geographical subfields in Religious Studies—the Caribbean, South Asia, and North America—and highlights the centrality of the study of religion to research on race, migration, minorities, diasporas, and the environment. 

The Newcombe Fellowship is the nation’s largest and most prestigious award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values.

The full press release can be found on the Citizens & Scholars’ website.

Columbia University Department of Religion PhD Student Khadeeja Majoka has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship from The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). 

This new program supports doctoral students in the humanities and interpretive social sciences as they pursue bold and innovative approaches to dissertation research. The fellowships are designed to intervene at the formative stage of dissertation development and promote research methodologies, project formats, and areas of inquiry that challenge traditional norms of doctoral education.

Congratulations, Khadeeja! 

Columbia Department of Religion PhD student Zehra Mehdi has been awarded the Core Preceptor Teaching Award for Contemporary Civilizations. The awards committee was impressed by not only Zehra's rigorous lectures, but also her community-building in the classroom. 

 

Congratulations, Zehra! 

Department of Religion major and Columbia College student Alethea Harnish has written and is directing a play for her senior thesis. Tickets and information can be found via the link below. 

This is Your Computer on Drugs


April 29th at 8pm & April 30th at 3pm
Glicker-Milstein Theatre in the Diana Center 


ComputerOnDrugs.com

The Department of Religion is pleased to announce that Lily Conable (BC '23) and Jane McBride (CC ’23)  are the joint winners of the 2023 Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize. Lily's paper is titled “Imagining Ancient Textual Lives: Rewriting and Reinterpreting the Provenance of The Thunder: Perfect Mind (NHC VI),” and was written in Professor Najam Haider's Fall 2022 Senior Research Seminar. Jane's paper is titled “Enchanting Writing: The Writer and Her Craft as Inherently Paradoxical,” and was written in Professor Najam Haider's Spring 2023 Senior Research Seminar.  

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 Lily & Jane! 

Department of Religion PhD student Connor Martini Receives 2023 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student Instructor

The award will be presented during a ceremony at the 2023 GSAS Awards Dinner and Reception, which will be held on Tuesday, June 6, 2023, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., in the Library at Casa Italiana. Past winners can be found here

In Black is a Church, Josef Sorett maps the ways in which black American culture and identity have been animated by a particular set of Protestant ideas and practices in order to chart the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity essential to the very notion of blackness. In doing so, Sorett reveals the ways that Christianity, white supremacy, and colonialism coalesced in the modern category of "religion" and became formative to the emergence of black identity in North America. Black is a Church examines the surprising alliances, peculiar performances, and at times contradictory ideas and complex institutions that shape the contours of black life in the United States. The book begins by arguing that Afro-Protestantism has relied upon literary strategies to explain itself since the earliest years of its formation. Through an examination of slave narratives and spiritual autobiographies, it shows how Protestant Christianity was essential to the establishment of the earliest black literary forms. Sorett then follows Afro-Protestantism's heterodox history in the convergence of literature, politics, and religion at the end of the nineteenth century. And he shows how religious aspirations animated early calls for a "race literature" and "the color line" provided an organizing logic for religious innovations as divergent as pluralism and Pentecostalism. From the earliest literary productions of the eighteenth century to the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the twenty-first, religion--namely Protestant Christianity--is seen to be at the very center of black life in North America.

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 Friday, March 24 at 5 p.m. Prize will be announced in mid-April.

Eligibility: Submissions must be

  • between 10-25 pages in length (excluding cover page and bibliography/references)
  • written for a course in the Department of Religion, in either Spring 2020 or Fall 2020 (Columbia and Barnard classes included)
  • authored by an undergraduate currently enrolled, in any college (GS, Columbia, Barnard, SEAS

Format: Submissions must be

  • submitted as a .pdf document
  • include a cover sheet with name, title, and course in which the paper was written

Submissions can be sent to: Eric Meyer ([email protected]), Department of Religion Columbia University

Department of Religion PhD Candidate Zehra Mehdi has been nominated in the global inspiration list of 100 Indian Muslim women in North America under the category of youth inspiration with a cutting edge approach to PhD research for her dissertation: The ‘work of Religion’: Trauma, Mourning and Political Resistance in the lives of Muslims in ‘Old Lucknow’.

https://www.inspiringindianmuslimwomen.org/global-inspirations-north-america

Rev. Dr. Garry Dorien’s book American Democratic Socialism has won the American Library Association’s Choice Award. This is the third time he has won this award. Previous times were for Social Ethics in the Making and for Breaking White Supremacy. The Choice Award “reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.” 

Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien shared, “I am grateful to the American Library Association for this wonderful honor. The book was a labor of love. Writing it was a constant reminder to me of the friends who have graced my life through forty-plus years of solidarity activism in Massachusetts, New York City, New Jersey, upstate New York, Michigan, and back to New York City. Teaching at Union while I get these last books out of my head is a singular honor for me that I cherish."

Kit Hermanson and Sarah Hedgecock have been selected to join the 2023 cohort of American Examples, a program at the University of Alabama that supports early-career scholars of religion in America to develop writing and research, pedagogy, and public scholarship. Kit is a PhD candidate in North American Religions and is writing their dissertation on nonbinary religious figures of the 19th-century United States. Sarah is also a PhD candidate in North American Religions, and her dissertation investigates nostalgia and evangelical girlhood.

The Abyss or Life is Simple: Reading Knausgaard Writing Religion

by Courtney Bender, Jeremy Biles, Liane Carlson, Joshua Dubler, Hannah C. Garvey, M. Cooper Harriss, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and Erik Thorstensen

Min kamp, or My Struggle, is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the novel presents an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a writer with the same name as the author, in a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted.

In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of My Struggle. Some were interested in Knausgaard’s attention to explicitly religious subjects and artworks, others to what they saw as more diffuse attention to the religiousness of contemporary life. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor—a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.


 

Nos Apocalypses

In her recently published book, Nos Apocalypses, a finalist for the 2022 Prix Medicis, Clémence Boulouque surveys religious responses to epidemics, from Exodus to the coronavirus, and of literary descriptions of diseases, from Boccacio and Goethe to Camus and Octavia Butler. Functioning as social criticism, scriptures and literary texts allow us to engage with questions of collective guilt, collective mourning, and divine justice (or the lack thereof), and to grapple with the societal disruptions, persecution, and discriminations that illnesses create or expose. While some of the parallels with our current times are obvious, these texts also help us to nuance responses to past epidemics and to read them anew. Nos Apocalypses is thus an invitation to understand scriptures as literature and to contemplate the uses of religious imagination in order to ponder what brings us together when disaster strikes. 

Professor Boulouque’s book developed from her 2020 undergraduate course From Exodus to Coronavirus.

Professor Boulouque will be speaking about the book at Maison Francaise on November 16 at 6 p.m. - click here to register for this in person event.