News
Dean of Humanities Bruno Bosteels has announced the second annual Division of Humanities Faculty Recognition Reception to celebrate teaching and service in the Humanities. Yannik Thiem, Associate Professor in Religion is being honored for Community Building and Engagement in the Humanities. Congratulations to Yannik!
The Departments of Religion at Columbia and Barnard are welcoming submissions for the annual Peter Awn Undergraduate Research Prize of $500 for the best paper or research project authored by an undergraduate for any course or seminar in Religion in 2024. This award honors our late colleague Peter Awn’s inspired teaching and his dedication to promoting and celebrating creative inquiry.
Submissions will be accepted until Monday, March 24, 2025 and should be submitted to [email protected]. The prize winner will be announced in mid-April.
Eligibility
- Papers (10-25 pages, excluding bibliography and references, or a chapter of a thesis) or work in other formats with comparable research effort (midterm or final exam essays are not eligible);
- The work must have been produced for a Religion course Spring 24, Summer 24, or Fall 24 or be a chapter from a Religion thesis being currently written;
- Barnard and Columbia Undergraduate Students from all disciplines and colleges are eligible.
Submission Format
-Students must submit directly and should submit the work electronically (papers as pdf document);
-The submission should include a cover sheet indicating the student's name, the paper or project title, and the course and term for which the paper or project was composed.
The Department of Religion congratulates Professor Gary Dorrien on the publication of his memoir "Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life” now available from Baylor University Press. Professor Dorrien was recently awarded the Gandhi, King, Mandela Peace Prize at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Gil Anidjar’s latest book, On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal, will be published in November by Columbia University Press. The Press is featuring the book on its website, in a blog post by Professor Anidjar, that picks up on some of the key themes in the book.
Aziza Shanazarova, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion, has a new book out with Cambridge University Press, Female Religiosity in Central Asia: Sufi Leaders in the Persianate World. Through revealing the fascinating story of the Sufi master Aghā-yi Buzurg and her path to becoming the “Great Lady” in sixteenth-century Bukhara, Professor Shanazarova invites readers into the little-known world of female religious authority in early modern Islamic Central Asia, revealing a far more multifaceted gender history than previously supposed. Pointing towards new ways of mapping female religious authority onto the landscapes of early modern Muslim narratives, this book serves as an intervention into the debate on the history of women and religion that views gender as a historical phenomenon and construct, challenging narratives of the relationship between gender and age in Islamic discourse of the period. Shanazarova draws on previously unknown primary sources to bring attention to a rich world of female religiosity involving communal leadership, competition for spiritual superiority, and negotiation with the political elite that transforms our understanding of women’s history in early modern Central Asia.
Columbia University Department of Religion Doctoral Student Nanea Renteria has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship for her project "Two Spirits: Gender, Oral History, and the Peyote Way."
Project Abstract:
The Native American Church (NAC) is a pan-Indigenous organization formed in 1918 to protect the religious use of peyote. To make Indigenous religious traditions legible within settler legal regimes, NAC leaders sought First Amendment protections when religious leadership was imagined as an exclusively male domain. Now, in the twenty-first century, women and gender variant people known as “two spirits” have begun to enter the NAC in greater numbers. Given that gender variance and women’s religious leadership were common in Indigenous societies prior to European colonization, how are women and two spirits today revitalizing a pre-colonial lineage? As a dual project of archival and oral history, this dissertation documents the resurgence, rearticulation, and renegotiation of gender, authority, and tradition within—and beyond—the Native American Church.
The Department of Religion is pleased to announce that Zoe Neuschatz (GS ’25) is the winner of the Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize. Zoe's submission "Eating is Believing: Religious Expression in Countercultural Cookbooks, 1975-1999," was written in Prof. Courtney Bender’s Fall 2023 Theory seminar.
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 Zoe!
In 2023 Jack Hawley published a paperback volume of translations of poems bearing the name of Surdas that he and, especially, Kenneth Bryant have established as belonging to the 16th century, when Surdas lived. This selection focuses exclusively on Krishna and his world.
As Harvard University Press, the publisher, explains, “The blind poet Surdas has been regarded as the epitome of artistry in Hindi verse from the end of the sixteenth century, when he lived, to the present day. His fame rests upon his remarkable refashioning of the widely known narrative of the Hindu deity Krishna and his lover Radha into lyrics that are at once elegant and approachable. Surdas's popularity led to the proliferation, through an energetic oral tradition, of poems ascribed to him, known collectively as the Sūrsāgar.”
"John Stratton Hawley miraculously manages to braid the charged erotic and divine qualities of Krishna, the many-named god, while introducing us--with subtle occasional rhyme--to a vividly particularized world of prayers and crocodile earrings, spiritual longing and love-struck bees."
-Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
A Hindu-Jewish Conversation: Root Traditions in Dialogue is a historical, theological, and phenomenological engagement of the Hindu and Jewish traditions, two “root” traditions that give rise to other—in some ways very different—types of religious traditions. Rachel Fell McDermott and Daniel F. Polish explore conceptions of the divine, which are frequently cited as the most serious obstacle to a serious theological engagement between the two traditions; differences in attitude towards heroes, saints, and holy people; the religious resources and challenges experienced by Hindu and Jewish women; what can be learned about Hindu and Jewish spiritual outpouring by comparing Hindu devotional poetry and the Book of Psalms; the ways in which the two traditions address the fraught question of theodicy, or why bad things happen to good people; the status of “the land” and nationalist claims on it; and the uncomfortable question of caste and its possible social parallels in the Jewish tradition. The authors weave considerations of these topics into an ongoing conversation that offers students of both traditions new ways of thinking both about their intersections and about the history of religion in general. A coda explores these same issues by recounting an actual series of discussions convened between Hindu and Jewish practitioners.
A Hindu-Jewish Conversation: Root Traditions in Dialogue
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2024)
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/
In February, 2023 Rajkamal Prakashan of Delhi published a Hindi translation of Jack Hawley’s 2020 book Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century. The Hindi title is Kṛṣṇa kī Līlābhūmi: 21vīṅ Sadī meṅ Vṛndāvan and the translator is Ashok Kumar. With this, Hawley hopes to make his words and thoughts accessible in the language where many of his interviews and encounters took place. A book launch chaired by Purushottam Agrawal, editor of Rajkamal’s Bhakti Mīmāṃsā series, and mentored by Shrivatsa Goswami, took place in Vrindavan itself.
Vrindavan is the place most closely associated with the god Krishna. It is here that he is believed to have spent his youth and adolescence—a wilderness of primordial appeal, a land of love. These days, however, Vrindavan’s special identity is deeply challenged by the pollution of the Yamuna River, on which it was built, and a construction boom that makes it increasingly an appendage of megalopolitan Delhi. Other major transformations are threatened. Can it still be Vrindavan?
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!