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.
Culture on the Edge, a group of scholars studying acts of identity formation and centered here at the University of Alabama, has a new book forthcoming in its series, Studies of Identity Formation. This book, Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of People and Place, edited by our own Prof. Vaia Touna, is set for publication in January 2019. […]
Read More from Scholars Around a Campfire: Understanding Strategic Acts of Identification
This weekend marked REL’s first homecoming bash on the balcony — we sent out invites to all alums for whom we have good mailing addresses and made sure our current majors & minors were in the loop. Our Alumni Liaison committee members were all there, as well as many faculty and staff members. The result? We’d say that about 50 or 60 students, grads, family, and friends came by before kick-off, for some food, some stories and, yes, some pictures. […]
MA Students and faculty met the other day to discuss the article chosen for this meeting of our regular journal group – which just so happened to be an article Prof. Steven Ramey and I coauthored. The article, titled Sourcing Stereotypes: Constructing and Challenging Simplified Knowledge, is made up of two main parts: a critique of a chart (and its corresponding citations) from a textbook in the nursing field concerned with what we took to be stereotypes (some of which […]
Since Prof. McCutcheon has offered a couple of posts with advice about the job market, one on campus interviews and one on the process more broadly, I thought I would add a post about another piece of the job market process: the CV. The topic of the CV came up the other day in our REL 502: Public Humanities Foundations course when we were looking at professional websites the students had built. Every student had included some sort of CV […]
The discourse of modernism has conventionally been dominated by a limiting attention to aesthetics, form, experimentation, and canon, often treated as standalone objects that capture the essence of modernist art — but what if we focus instead on social politics as a driving force behind the modernist movement? What new perspective might be gained if we unite the typically separated categories of aesthetics and politics? In their forthcoming book, Race and New Modernisms, REL Prof. Merinda Simmons and English Prof. […]
Jacob Inglis is a junior from Huntsville, Alabama majoring in International Studies and minoring in Korean, Asian Studies, and the Randall Research Scholars Program with an interest in Inter-Korean politics and diplomacy. The world watched over the past year as war on the Korean Peninsula, an inevitable outcome according to North Korea, seemed poised to reignite. Amidst the backdrop of the controversial deployment of additional anti-ballistic missile systems, the testing of North Korea’s newest intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting […]
Last week I wrote a post on some strategies to think about when applying for academic jobs. As I wrote there, I’ve played the role of Chair long enough that, like many others in the field, I’ve learned a thing or two from being on this side of the interview table; and so, with interview season quickly approaching us, I thought that a sensible follow-up should be some reflections on the on-campus interview, as seen from the Department’s point of […]
For the past few years different versions of a conference bingo card have been making the rounds on social media, with squares to check off for things like “Question that’s not a question” or “All male panel” and other sorts of typical conference experiences that many of us know all too well. In time for the start of the new school year The Chronicle of Higher Education released its own bingo card, this time for the first faculty meeting: […]
Dan Wells is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. He is currently finishing a dissertation entitled, “Better Dead Than Red: A History of the Christian Crusade Aesthetic.” Growing up I wanted to be Indiana Jones. I wanted to see some adventure. Long before my awareness of the almost innumerable issues that plagued the series, I thought melting Nazi faces off with ancient artifacts while wearing a cool hat and neglecting professional responsibilities in service […]
Read More from Adventures in Archives, Classification, and Eldridge Cleaver
Interviewed by Kim Davis (BA 2003), Jennifer Alfano Nelson (BA 2007) was the Department’s guest at the first Grad Tales of the new year, held in the Ferguson Student Union last night. Now hosted by the Department’s recently-formed Alumni Liaison Committee (of which both Jennifer and Kim are members), Grad Tales is an ongoing series that dates to 2013-14 when alums were first invited back, to meet with current students and to discuss their careers and how, in hindsight, they […]