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Contemporary Theories of Religion (481-2-20)

Topic

Thinking with, through, and against 'religion'

Instructors

Brannon Dobbs Ingram
Crowe Hall 4-135

Meeting Info

Crowe 4-130 Rel Studies Sem Rm: Tues 3:00PM - 5:30PM

Overview of class

Secularities: Thinking with, through, and against "religion"

This course will introduce graduate students to a range of approaches to theorizing the category of "religion" in recent interdisciplinary scholarship. In this course, these approaches will revolve primary around theories of secularity - that is, theories of how the category of "religion" is produced, negotiated, maintained, and/or contested in its intersections with other domains of human life against which it is often defined, e.g. "culture," "society," and so on. We will also see some of the ways scholars have approached the ways that the category of religion informs, or intersects with, law and politics. We will begin with pioneering work in this subject from Talal Asad, Gauri Viswanathan, Winnifred Sullivan, and Saba Mahmoud. We will then proceed to explore how a second wave of scholars on secularity put these foundational texts in conversation with a range of archives, drawing on scholars such as Elizabeth Hurd, Courtney Bender, and Hussein Agrama. Finally, we turn our attention to the most recent scholarship in this vein from the likes of Joseph Blankholm, Elayne Oliphant, John Modern, and Charles McCrary.