Recent scholarship has demonstrated that “religion” as we know it today is a post-Enlightenment concept. But this fact has not changed common discourse that assumes the universality of religion, nor has it stopped…
According to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, Queen Helena of Adiabene traveled from her kingdom in northern Mesopotamia to Jerusalem to worship the Jewish God in the temple. She ended up…
Over the course of the twentieth century, Shia Ismaili Muslim communities were repeatedly displaced. How, in the aftermath of these displacements, did they remake their communities? Professor Shenila Khoja-Moolji…
Samantha M. Cooper, Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
Feb 6, 2024
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Many instructors in the humanities are accustomed to using the “reading” as the primary unit of analysis, and we are often trained to guide our students through an analysis of a written text. But cultural artifacts…
At first blush, we might want to reject the idea of ancestral fault, the idea of visiting upon the sons the sins of the fathers (e.g., Deut. 5:9–10), from generation to…
What is happening when groups of people treat their sacred beliefs, spaces, rituals, histories, and institutions as a foundation for humor, comedy, or satire, at the…
We take it as axiomatic in our research that a text cannot be fully understood when read in translation. But outside of dedicated language departments, instructors of undergraduate courses can rarely expect their…
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…
