Event

Below is a list of Penn faculty, graduate students, and recent graduates (marked with *) who will be presenting at the 2023 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. A full program book can be found here.

Please be sure to join us for these presentations and our Boardman Reception, which will be held on Saturday from 19:00–20:30, location TBA.

Friday 11/17

• 11:00–17:00 (AAR) Religion and Media Workshop: Tracing Activism through Religion and Media (Anthea Butler)

Saturday 11/18

• 9:00–11:00 (AAR) African Religions Unit: Black Being, Comparative Religion, and Mortuary Rituals (David Amponsah, AFRC)
• 9:00–11:30 (SBL) Religious World of Late Antiquity: Beginnings (Reyhan Durmaz)
• 12:30–14:30 (AAR) Hinduism Unit & North American Hinduism Unit: Who Speaks for Hinduism Now? (Rupa Pillai, ASAM)
• 12:30–14:30 (AAR) Pentecostal-Charismatic Movements Unit: Re-examining American Pentecostalism from the 20th Century to the Present (Gabriel Raeburn*)
• 12:30–14:30 (AAR) Public Understanding of Religion Committee and Religion and Politics Unit: The Threat of White Christian Nationalism and its Intersections: A Roundtable on the Implications of the New PRRI/Brookings Study for American Democracy (Anthea Butler)
• 12:30–14:30 (AAR) Study of Islam Unit: Graduate Student Session (Hallie Nell Swanson)
• 14:00–16:00 (AAR) Society for the Study of Japanese Religions Meeting-in-Conjunction: Practically Religious in Practice: 25 Years of Scholarship and Counting (Jolyon Thomas)
• 15:00–16:30 (AAR) Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit, Religion in Southeast Asia Unit, and South Asian Religions Unit: Queer Religion in South and Southeast Asia: Identity, Community, and Textual Traditions (Aditya Bhattacharjee*)
• 15:00–16:30 (AAR) Science, Technology, and Religion Unit: Author Meets Critics: Donovan Schaefer’s Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Donovan Schaefer)
• 19:00–20:30 (AAR/SBL) University of Pennsylvania Boardman Reception (Hilton, The Pavilion, Main Level; Session ID: M18-502)

Sunday 11/19

• 9:00–11:00 (AAR) Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society Unit, Esotericism Unit, Japanese Religions Unit, New Religious Movements Unit: Author-Meets-Critics Roundtable: Justin B. Stein, Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific (Jolyon Thomas)
• 9:00–11:00 (AAR) Confucian Traditions Unit: "Religion" Versus "Philosophy" in the Study of Chinese Texts and Traditions (Ori Tavor, EALC)
• 9:00–11:00 (AAR) Religion and Disability Studies Unit and Religion, Affect, and Emotion Unit: The Shadow Conference: Disability, Debility, and Impairment in the Academic Mundane (Kirby Sokolow)
• 9:00–11:00 (AAR/SBL) Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity Unit and SBL's Syriac Studies Program Unit: Contending with Scholarly Legacies: Orientalism in the Study of the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean (Reyhan Durmaz)
• 12:30–14:30 (AAR) Asian North American Religions Unit and Buddhism in the West Unit: Buddhism, Race, Power and Solidarity in North America (Kirby Sokolow)
• 12:30–14:30 (AAR) Religion and Disability Studies Unit: Author-Meets-Readers: Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole, Julia Watts Belser (Angela Xia)
• 15:00–16:30 (AAR) Religion and Food Unit: Food, Culture, Transformation (Max Dugan)
• 17:00–18:30 (AAR) Hinduism Unit and North American Hinduism Unit: Recasting Hindu Religious Spaces in Diaspora (Aditya Bhattacharjee*)
• 17:00–18:30 (AAR) Middle Eastern Christianity Unit: Middle Eastern Christianity Studies: Theories, Methods, and Approaches to an Emerging Field (Weston Bland, NELC)

Monday 11/20

• 9:00–11:00 (AAR) Middle Eastern Christianity Unit and Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity Unit: Pushing the Boundaries of the Late Antique East (Reyhan Durmaz; Jae Han*)
• 12:30–14:30 (AAR) Anthropology of Religion Unit: Listening and Translating Ethnographic Research (Rupa Pillai, ASAM)
• 12:30–14:30 (AAR) Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Unit: The Labor of Interpretation: Theory and History in Religious Studies (Donovan Schaefer)
• 12:30–14:30 (AAR) Cultural History of the Study of Religion Unit and Religion and Public Schools: International Perspectives Unit: Religion and Education in the Global Cold War: Constructing Categories through Discourses on Academic Freedom, Whiteness, Family, and Communism (Samuel Herrmann)
• 16:00–18:30 (SBL) Book of Daniel (Jeremy Steinberg)

Tuesday 11/21

• 8:30–10:00 (AAR) Study of Islam Unit: Studying Islam in a Material World (Max Dugan)
• 10:30–12:00 (AAR) Contemporary Islam Unit: Representing, Performing, and Embodying Islam in Contemporary Contexts (Abdul Manan Bhat)