Fall 2024 Courses of Interest
Course: Climate, Religion and Colonialism
Instructor: Raffaella Taylor-Seymour
Description: This course examines intersections between religion and climate through the lens of colonialism. In recent years, scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences have suggested that the climate crisis dates to the advent of European colonialism in the 16th and 17th centuries. This literature argues that colonial projects involved the remaking of landscapes via “terraforming,” seeking to inscribe European imaginaries on the land and extract value from it, while violently suppressing and destroying local and Indigenous lifeworlds. At the same time, a longstanding body of literature has investigated the relationship between colonialism and religion, focusing on missionary efforts to remake religious subjects and subjectivities and draw boundaries between true religion and its opposites, “paganism” and “superstition.” This course seeks to understand these two processes within the same frame, examining how colonial projects entailed simultaneous efforts to subjugate, extract value from, and transform people and landscapes. By the end of the semester, students will have deepened and nuanced their understandings of climate, religion, and colonialism, and come away with new ways of thinking about the climate crisis.
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Course: Early Modern Indigenous Thought
Instructor: Timothy Vasko
Description: What is the source of truth and authority? What is the origin of the world and how does that determine the social order? Who ought to rule, why, and how? What are the standards for measuring justice and injustice? What is our relationship to the environment around us and how should its resources be distributed among people? How do we relate to those who are different from us, and what does it mean to be a community in the first place? Historically, the answers to these questions that have been described as “religious” and “political” have been restricted to a specific tradition of Western European Christianity and its secular afterlives. However, these are questions that every society asks, in order to be a society in the first place. This course analyzes how indigenous peoples in the Americas asked and answered these questions through the first three centuries of Western European imperial rule. At the same time, this course pushes students to question what gets categorized as uniquely “indigenous” thought, how, and why.
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Course: The Doctrine of Discovery: Religion, Law, and Legacies of 1492
Instructor: Timothy Vasko
Description: How did European-Christians justify the colonization of the Americas? Did these justifications vary between different European empires, and between the Protestant and Catholic faiths, and if so, how? Do these justifications remain in effect in modern jurisprudence and ministries? This class explores these questions by introducing students to the Doctrine of Discovery. The Doctrine of Discovery is the defining legal rationale for European Colonization in the Western Hemisphere. The Doctrine has its origins in a body of ecclesiastic, legal, and philosophical texts dating to the late-fifteenth century, and was summarized by Chief Justice John Marshall of the United States Supreme Court, in the final, unanimous decision the judiciary issued on the 1823 case Johnson v. M’Intosh. Students will be introduced to the major, primary texts that make up the Doctrine, as well as contemporary critical studies of these texts and the Doctrine in general.
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Course: Magic and Modernity
Instructor: Matthew Engelke
Description: This course introduces students to the cultural history of magic: as an idea, as a practice, and as a tool with which wield power and induce wonder. Magic, as we will explore, is a modern concept, the contours of which have been shaped by its relations with religion and science, always against larger backdrops—of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, (post) colonialism, and (post) secularism. Readings are drawn from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, sociology, drama, literature, history, history of science, and political theory. Cases and readings focus on everything from medieval England to post-socialist Mozambique. Throughout the term, a recurring theme will be whether, and to what extent, magic is incompatible with modernity—or, actually, integral to its constitution.
By the end of this course, students should be familiar with a variety of ways in which magic has been understood since the early modern era, in a wide range of settings and cultural contexts. By tracing understandings of magic, students should also come away with an appreciation of how the authority of being “modern” is constructed (and contested) in relation to contemporary valuations of reason, science, enchantment, and the imagination.
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Course: Religion and Media
Instructor: Matthew Engelke
Description: This is a course designed for students interested in media and their connections to religious traditions and practices. This includes a consideration of specific mediums, including print, photography, radio, television, film, and the internet. But there is also an important manner in which media technologies have to be understood in relation to the more elementary senses they express (hearing, sight, etc). We therefore investigate media as both a broad conceptual category and as specific technologies of communication. So lots on books, TV, phones and the like, but also presence, auras, connection, distance, broadcasting, and immediacy. Course texts will include a combination of conceptual works as well as case studies drawn from major religious traditions. The learning goals of the course are: (1) to introduce seminal interpretive and methodological issues in the contemporary study of media/mediation; (2) to study some theoretical classics in the fields of media studies and religious studies, to provide a foundation for further reading; (3) to introduce new writing in the field; and (4) to encourage students to think of ways in which the issues and authors surveyed might provide models for their own interests and research. This course is geared toward graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. Some background in religious studies and/or media studies is helpful but not required.
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Course: American Religions in extremis
Instructor: Courtney Bender
Description: Description This seminar focuses on historical, sociological, and first-hand accounts of a diverse set of American non-conformist religious and spiritual groups (including MOVE, the Branch Davidians at Waco, Father Divine's International Peace Mission, the Oneida Perfectionists, and Occupy and others). Diverse in their historical origins, their activities, and their ends, each of the groups sought or seeks to offer radically new ways of living, subverting American gender, sexuality, racial, or economic norms. The title of this seminar highlights the ways that these groups explain their reasons for existing (to themselves or others) not as a choice but as a response to a system or society out of whack, at odds with the plans of the divine, or at odds with nature and survival. Likewise, it considers the numerous ways that these same groups have often found themselves the targets of state surveillance and violence.
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Course: Islam in the Soviet Union and Successor States
Instricutor: Aziza Shanazarova
Description: This seminar is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students seeking to develop an understanding of Islam in the Soviet Union and its successor states. The Soviet experience drastically altered the ways Central Asian Muslims practice Islam. This course explores the various ways in which Central Asian Muslims practiced Islam during the Soviet era and the lasting impacts of that period on contemporary Central Asia. Topics covered include the Soviet campaign against Islam, Soviet Islamic authorities, the growth of international Islamic networks in post-Soviet Central Asia, emerging Islamic movements, and common Islamic practices like pilgrimage and Islamic healing. Additionally, we will read theoretical and topical articles on comparable Islamic practices in various regions of the Muslim world to provide a broader perspective on Central Asia. All of the readings for this course will be in English. Prior course work related to Islam or the Soviet Union is recommended, but not required.
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Course: Women and Islam
Instructor: Aziza Shanazarova
Description: This course is a comprehensive engagement with Islamic perspectives on women with a specific focus on the debates about woman’s role and status in Muslim societies. Students will learn how historical, religious, socio-economic and political factors influence the lives and experiences of Muslim women. A variety of source materials (the foundational texts of Islam, historical and ethnographic accounts, women’s and gender studies scholarship) will serve as the framework for lectures. Students will be introduced to women’s religious lives and a variety of women’s issues as they are reported and represented in the works written by women themselves and scholars chronicling women’s religious experiences. We will begin with an overview of the history and context of the emergence of Islam from a gendered perspective. We will explore differing interpretations of the core Islamic texts concerning women, and the relationship between men and women: who speaks about and for women in Islam? In the second part of the course we will discuss women’s religious experiences in different parts of the Muslim world. Students will examine the interrelationship between women and religion with special emphasis on the ways in which the practices of religion in women’s daily lives impact contemporary societies. All readings will be in English. Prior course work in Islam or women’s studies is recommended, but not required.
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