This core seminar introduces graduate students to key themes in the study of religion in modern South Asia, with a focus on debates related to Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity in India from the nineteenth century to the present. Drawing upon a range of methodological and theoretical approaches, the seminar covers themes such as colonial and missionary constructions of religious categories, Orientalism and textual authority, social and religious “reform” movements, questions of caste and gender, and debates about religious nationalisms, democracy, and secularism.

This graduate seminar entertains the history of African American cultural production primarily in the twentieth century through foundational and emerging works in the field. This seminar focuses on African American religious history, with a focus on the material, visual, auditory, and literary religious constructions of everyday worlds, lives, and professions. Our readings attend to intersectional dimensions of African American religious life, highlighting the connections of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, alternative religious identities, and region.
A focus on Black cultural production and its producers enriches African American religious history. Seminar participants will engage the theoretical concerns and methodological approaches that illuminate the ways that Black women and men capture and (re)shape the meaning of their worlds in a variety of domestic, professional, social, and political settings. The seminar’s primary aims are to help participants define interests within the field to pursue further study, to consider potential areas of research, and to aid preparation for doctoral examinations.

This course asks the question: what changes with the arrival of print in South Asia? The printing press arrived in India in force in 1800, within 25 years, hundreds of publications proliferated in several South Asian languages. The adoption and response to print in South Asia offers understanding not only regarding information dissemination but also authority production among a wide range of religious and cultural groups in South Asia. We will consider critically the relationship between material culture, networks of political power, modes of authority transmission and religious meaning in South Asia from 1600 to the present. This course will start with a unit considering the techniques of manuscript knowledge reproduction and transmission across South Asia from 1600 to 1800. We will then consider the rise of the East India Company's Press in the late 18th century, the development of print techniques, and the appearance of the private publishing company. We will then consider the rise of Lahore as a printing hub and center of print culture in the 19th century, alongside the wider entrenchment of a newspaper print network, railway and postal networks. The early 20th century sees the rise of both large urban and qasbah-based newspaper networks, alongside a thriving print culture in the context of nationalist movements and communal conversations. A final unit on the post-Partition milieu looks a the rise of digital and new medias. Crucial to our conversation will be the symbiotic role of print and formation of new boundaries around the category of religion.

From Marvin Gaye, to Tammy Faye Baker, to Sarah Palin and James Baldwin, Pentecostalism has influenced many, including politicians, preachers, writers, and the media. One of the fastest growing religious movements in the world, Pentecostalism continues to have a profound effect on the religious landscape. Pentecostalism's unique blend of charismatic worship, religious practices, and flamboyant, media-savvy leadership, has drawn millions into this understudies and often controversial religious movement. This course will chronicle the inception and growth of Pentecostalism in the United States, giving particular attention to beliefs, practices, gender, ethnicity, and Global Pentecostalism.

This graduate seminar will map the theories and methods underpinning the contemporary study of religion. To draw this map, we will consider the history of the field. We'll proceed by examining how problems within religious studies have been resolved in different ways at different times, constructing a web of dialogs and debates between different figures across history. Specific topics to be considered will include experience, discourse, embodiment, feminism, postcolonialism, science, and materiality.

This undergraduate seminar places contemporary Black spiritualities at the center of the study of African-descended peoples. Through recent books in the ethnography of Africana religions, spiritual communities in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America that have established communities in the United States will constitute the focus of our course readings and anchor our weekly discussions. As an advanced seminar, our meetings will allow participants to interrogate the authors of these ethnographies. We will assess how these accounts have conceptualized the African diaspora and the vantages (“insiders” and “outsiders”) from which they describe religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. Beyond considering the commonalities and distinctions in form and practice that characterize various African diasporic religious practices, participants will also work to understand the constructions of race and belonging, ethnic identity, gender, sexuality, class, and geographic location that affect the lives of Black religious adherents.

Changes of faith are complex shifts that involve social, spiritual, intellectual, and even physical alterations. In the premodern West, when legal status was often determined by religious affiliation and the state of one’s soul was a deathly serious matter, such changes were even more fraught. What led a person to undertake an essential transformation of identity that could affect everything from food to family to spiritual fulfillment? Whether we are speaking of individual conversions of conscience or the coerced conversions of whole peoples en masse, religious change has been central to the global development and spread of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and reveals much about the people and contexts in which it took place.
This seminar will explore the dynamics of conversion across a range of medieval and early modern contexts. We will investigate the motivations for conversions, the obstacles faced by converts, and the issues raised by conversion from the perspective of those who remained within a single tradition. How did conversion efforts serve globalization and empire, and what other power relations were involved? How did peoplehood, nationality, or race play out in conversion and its aftermath? How did premodern people understand conversion differently from each other, and differently than their coreligionists or scholars do today? The course will treat a number of specific examples, including autobiographical conversion narratives and conversion manuals, the role ascribed to conversion in visions of messianic redemption, forced conversions under Spanish and Ottoman rule, missionizing in the age of European expansion, and more.
The course aims to hone students’ skills in thinking about—and with—premodern religiosity, opening up new perspectives on the past and present by reading primary texts and analytical research.

Contemporary Jewish identity exists at an uneasy cross-section of race, religion and ethnicity. This course aims to expose students to the diversity of Jewish experience through the lenses of race and religion, examining the various ways these categories intersect and complicate each other. How can the study of race and religion help us to understand the present and future of Jewish life? How do Jews figure in the study of race and race relations in North America and Israel? Of what relevance is the category of whiteness for understanding Jewish identity, and what does their association in the U.S. mask about Jews and Jewish life today? And what are the roles of Jews in the continuing struggle for racial justice now underway in the world? This course aims to address these questions in light of a range of intellectual perspectives and disciplinary approaches. It will be built around a series of weekly guest lectures by leading scholars of Jews, race and/or religion, and will include among the questions and topics that it explores opportunities to explore connections among scholarship, personal experience and activism.

This course seeks to introduce students to the diversity of doctrines held and practices performed by Buddhists in Asia. By focusing on how specific beliefs and practices are tied to particular locations and particular times, we will be able to explore in detail the religious institutions, artistic, architectural, and musical traditions, textual production and legal and doctrinal developments of Buddhism over time and within its socio-historical context. Religion is never divorced from its place and its time. Furthermore, by geographically and historically grounding the study of these religions we will be able to examine how their individual ethic, cosmological and soteriological systems effect local history, economics, politics, and material culture. We will concentrate first on the person of the Buddha, his many biographies and how he has been followed and worshipped in a variety of ways from Lhasa, Tibet to Phrae, Thailand. From there we touch on the foundational teachings of the Buddha with an eye to how they have evolved and transformed over time. Finally, we focus on the practice of Buddhist ritual, magic and ethics in monasteries and among aly communities in Asia and even in the West. This section will confront the way Buddhists have thought of issues such as "Just-War," Women's Rights and Abortion. While no one quarter course could provide a detailed presentation of the beliefs and practices of Buddhism, my hope is that we will be able to look closely at certain aspects of these religions by focusing on how they are practiced in places like Nara, Japan or Vietnam, Laos.

This course seeks to introduce students to the diversity of doctrines held and practices performed by Buddhists in Asia. By focusing on how specific beliefs and practices are tied to particular locations and particular times, we will be able to explore in detail the religious institutions, artistic, architectural, and musical traditions, textual production and legal and doctrinal developments of Buddhism over time and within its socio-historical context. Religion is never divorced from its place and its time. Furthermore, by geographically and historically grounding the study of these religions we will be able to examine how their individual ethic, cosmological and soteriological systems effect local history, economics, politics, and material culture. We will concentrate first on the person of the Buddha, his many biographies and how he has been followed and worshipped in a variety of ways from Lhasa, Tibet to Phrae, Thailand. From there we touch on the foundational teachings of the Buddha with an eye to how they have evolved and transformed over time. Finally, we focus on the practice of Buddhist ritual, magic and ethics in monasteries and among aly communities in Asia and even in the West. This section will confront the way Buddhists have thought of issues such as "Just-War," Women's Rights and Abortion. While no one quarter course could provide a detailed presentation of the beliefs and practices of Buddhism, my hope is that we will be able to look closely at certain aspects of these religions by focusing on how they are practiced in places like Nara, Japan or Vietnam, Laos.