Yes, I tweeted the above, this morning, in response to a tweet about “an older prof” who supposedly said to someone that writing book reviews is “professionally worthless.” What I find so frustrating is the contempt that many scholars (older or younger) seem to have for the day-to-day machinery of the field — from reviewing essay submissions to journals, reviewing book submissions to publishers, reviewing tenure & promotion applications, reviewing books, and editing journals to advising students, supervising graduate work, […]
Category: Religion in Culture
Posts in this category discuss how those aspects of culture known as religion can be studied in a way comparable to all other cultural practices.
REL MA Students Present at Culture Studies Conference
Today’s panel with REL MA students was part of the interdisciplinary culture studies graduate student conference, planned by a grad student committee and funded through the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. REL was represented on the planning committee by second year MA student Keeley McMurray, and it is taking place at the Bryan Conference Center on campus. […]
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American Examples: What Did You Gain From Being Part of AE?
Prea Persaud (B.A. from Rollins College, M.A. from Syracuse University, Doctoral Candidate at the University of Florida) is a Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte where her teaching focuses on Hinduism. In addition to teaching classes on Hinduism and the Hindu diaspora, she also teaches classes on the Caribbean. She is interested in global Hinduism, religion in the Americas (inclusive of the Caribbean), and issues concerning race, identity, and post-colonialism. […]
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“Working Yourself into a Shoot”: When is a Performance a Performance?
As some of you may know, I love pro wrestling and I think it can be good data for the scholar of religion. Let me offer a recent example that lit up the wrestling fan twitters over the weekend. The WWE, the world’s biggest wrestling company, toured through Canada over the weekend, holding a show in Edmonton, Alberta. While driving through Canada, one of the wrestlers, Lacey Evans, was pulled over for speeding. She posted this video on Twitter Saturday. 1.Canada […]
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Country Music
You a fan of country music? If so, then you may already know about Ken Burns’ new 16 hour documentary, on PBS. (Maybe you’ve seen some of his others…?) But if you’re not a fan you probably should still be watching it, since (at least in the first episode) it provides some wonderful examples of how a scholar who goes digging in the archives, after the little details, can unearth some really interesting things. […]
Internships as Part of the REL M.A. Program
We recently sat down with Caity Bell, a second year M.A. student in Religious Studies, and talked about internship opportunities. This past summer she helped frame historic representations during her internship with the Landmarks Association of DeKalb County (pictured above). 1. How did you first hear about the chance to do an internship as part of your MA in Religious Studies? Caity: I first heard about the opportunity during one of our colloquium sessions. Dr. Merinda Simmons, our Grad Director, […]
The Aaron Aronov Chair in Judaic Studies
We have some news: Associate Professor Daniel Levine, a faculty member in UA’s Department of Political Science, has just been appointed by the University of Alabama Board of Trustees as the Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies. He will now have a co-appointment to both Political Science and the Department of Religious Studies, teaching equally for both units — with his first REL course (a Core course on religion and politics) coming in the Spring 2020 semester. Dr. Levine […]
Family Resemblance and the Social Risks of Guess Who
Years ago, before I had kids, I was chitchatting with an acquaintance. I cannot recall what we were actually talking about. The memory is remarkable to me because these days I am rarely alone enough to enjoy a leisurely adult conversation. I can’t believe now how much I took such moments for granted back then. Anyway, in the midst of the conversation, the acquaintance’s young daughter came out of a building to meet her mother. They can’t have been apart […]
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Getting the Party Started on Syllabus Day
The first day of class can be a bit nerve-racking, even for profs. One might think that profs have it easy at the start of the semester, but we all know the importance of first impressions. And for myself, there can be a lot of anxiety around those initial activities. How much of the syllabus should we read? I don’t want to bore anyone, but I don’t want students starting out lost. Do we dive right into content? The semester […]
“The Personal Faith of Each Individual”
Recently, my friend, Jack Llewellyn, sent me the following email, with some very useful observations on just how widely used the rhetorical of personal faith has been. With his permission, I copy it below: Continuing to research Partition, I ran into a quote — speaking as the President of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947, in what was really his inaugural address to the new nation, Mohammed Ali Jinnah said (among other things): “Now I think we […]