Fall 2025 Courses of Interest
Course: Christianity and Culture
Instructor: Matthew Engelke
Description: This course provides an introduction to Christianity through the lens of culture and culture theory. Which aspects of Christian faith and practice can we understand as universal or shared, and which are conditioned by the specificities of time and place? Does Christianity itself have a culture, or shape particular understandings of the self and society? Readings are drawn from a range of sources, including primary texts, anthropology, history, philosophy, theology, and fiction. The majority of our focus will be on the modern period, with particular attention to Catholicism and Pentecostalism in the global South (including Africa and Melanesia). Topics covered will include the comparative study of virtues and values (salvation, grace, sincerity), as well as Christianity’s many and varied relationships to the realms of politics, economics, and society. Students should come away from this course with a solid grounding in major features of Christianity, especially its Catholic and Protestant forms. The course will also provide students with an introduction to culture theory. Critical writing and reading skills will also be a focus, along with class participation. The course will also 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 anthropology or literary criticism is helpful but not required.
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Course: Islam
Instructor: Aziza Shanazarova
Description: An introduction to the Islamic religion in its premodern and modern manifestations. The first half of the course concentrates on “classical” Islam, beginning with the life of the Prophet, and extending to ritual, jurisprudence, theology, and mysticism. The second half examines how Muslims have articulated Islam in light of colonization and the rise of a secular modernity. The course ends with a discussion of American and European Muslim attempts at carving out distinct spheres of identity in the larger global Muslim community. The coursework will draw from scholarship, policy documents, and real-world case studies on issues ranging from climate crisis to conspiracy. Focusing on examples of advocacy, considerations of democratic renewal and decline, and competing claims of power and authority, this seminar considers the ways in which our definitions of religion impact lived, embodied, and practiced forms of religion and secularism in our current moment.
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Course: History of Horror Cinema
Instructor: Eleanor Johnson
Description: As has become very obvious in American culture in the past twenty years or so, horror is having a moment. This is particularly true in American cinema, where horror tends to cost less and earn more for film producers than almost any other subgenre. The rise of horror has also, of course, been affected by the rise of perceived and real threats to public and individual safety—pandemics, government malfeasance, ecological catastrophe, etc. But the recent surge of popularity in horror doesn’t mean it’s a “new” genre; far from it, the horror genre extends as far back in American film history as film itself as a medium. This course will look at the entire history of horror cinema, focusing on American film. We will start before the era of the “talkie” movie, and will move forward, taking exemplary films from each decade, until we reach about 2020. The course will think about genre, subgenre, and formal elements of filmic analysis, and will also consider elements of American history and culture that inform and inflect the more concrete, material elements of film.
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Course: Theory & Method-Study of Religion
Instructor: Dominique Townsend
Description: “Theories and Methods” courses in any field are commonly unwieldy beasts. They cannot but be a compromise-formation between contemporary questions and texts, ideas, and definitions (alongside a whole lot of problems) that we have inherited as “canonical” in a field. In the best case, such a course is a passageway into deeper engagement with a field, its histories, its complexities, and its possibilities from which we might wrest and build viable futures. Disciplinary fields are structures where power and knowledge are produced and reproduced. The study of religion is no exception. The questions of “how is ‘religion’ constructed as a category here?” and “what work does the designation of something or someone as ‘religious’ do?” will, therefore, accompany us throughout our work over the course of this semester. We will also examine how different methodological commitments shape what objects of study and which questions come to the fore for the study of religion. This course will explore how the study of religion is not reducible to the study of traditions and communities that are readily recognized as “religious.” However, the vexed histories of the construction of “religion” as a category of knowledge production does also not negate that there are large, varied, and flourishing communities of practice beyond the university for whom whether or not “religion” exists is not at all a question. Holding these layers of complexity in play, this course seeks to introduce students exemplarily to key texts and concepts that have shaped the study of religion as we encounter it today as an academic discipline.
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Course: Aesthetics in Tibetan Buddhism
Instructor: Dominique Townsend
Description: What does beauty have to do with Buddhism? Should it be understood as a mark of virtue or a font of attachment? And more broadly, what is the role of the senses and the objects of the senses in Buddhist practice? In this seminar students engage with images, objects, texts, sounds, feelings, and tastes to understand the significance of aesthetics in Tibetan Buddhism. Beyond treating aesthetics as the philosophy of art and beauty, students will consider the profound and variegated role of the senses and their objects in Buddhist experience. When are the senses limiting and when are they liberating? When are artworks objects of attachment for practitioners, and when are they supports for practice? Most fundamentally, together we will investigate how aesthetics can be ethically coded—for example, by asking why beauty is so often associated with virtue. This multidisciplinary seminar is designed for graduate students and is also open to advanced undergraduates with instructor’s approval.
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Course: Religion and Political Thought
Instructor: Timothy Vasko
Description: Are “belief” and “reason” two different things? What is the proper role of religion in modern society? How do we determine what is just and unjust in the absence of a Higher Law? Does religion continue to influence political decision-making in liberal democracies, and if so, how? These questions continue to animate debates about the relationship between religion and politics today. This class examines articulations of and responses to this question in the political thought of the Enlightenment, a period that has traditionally been described as the moment when “the West” parted ways with religion and religious belief as the foundation for its understanding of truth, justice, and social order. In this class, we will examine classic and overlooked works of Enlightenment philosophy. We will interrogate whether the Enlightenment really signaled a departure from religion. We will also examine whether the Enlightenment was the preserve — much less the invention — of white Europeans and American settlers. We will do so with an eye toward the politics of the present, examining how Enlightenment thought’s engagement with religion produced discourses of race, gender, economy, and nationhood that continue to shape the terms of political discourse today.
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Course: Religion and Human Rights
Instructor: Timothy Vasko
Description: What is the relationship between religion and human rights? How have different religious traditions conceived of “the human” as a being worthy of inherent dignity and respect, particularly in moments of political, military, economic, and ecological crisis? How and why have modern regimes of human rights privileged some of these ideas and marginalized others? What can these complicated relationships between religion and human rights explain some of the key crises in human rights law and politics today, and what avenues can be charted for moving forward? In this class, we will attempt to answer these questions by first developing a theoretical understanding of some of the key debates about the origins, trajectories, and legacies of modern human rights’ religious entanglements. We will then move on to examine various examples of ideas about and institutions for protecting “humanity” from different regions and histories. Specifically, we will examine how different societies, organizations, and religious traditions have addressed questions of war and violence; freedom of belief and expression; gender and sexual orientation; economic inequality; ecology; and the appropriate ways to punish and remember wrongdoing. In doing so, we will develop a repertoire of theoretical and empirical tools that can help us address both specific crises of human rights in various contexts, as well as the general crisis of faith and and observance of human rights as a universal norm and aspiration for peoples everywhere.
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