While working on a Masters degree, I recall an early-career professor in whose office a friend and I would regularly meet for one of our classes. As I recall, he was still working on finishing his own Ph.D. at the time and on his wall he had nicely mounted a large piece of interesting-looking driftwood, all gnarly and weathered, which had been signed by a bunch of people. One day we asked what it was. He replied with a story […]
Category: Relevance of Humanities
Posts in this category discuss the wider relevance of those tools, methods, and disciplines often grouped together and called the Humanities.
“Would You Still Call Yourself an Asianist?”
In December 2013, Prof. Russell McCutcheon sat down with Prof. Steven Ramey to discuss how Ramey’s work on Asia has transitioned in the past several years. While he still focuses on Asia in much of his work, “… a shift in research focus from inter-religious cooperation to diaspora religion, eventually studying south Asian communities in the U.S. south, led the way to a far broader interest not only in social theory but in the practical implications of categorization for creating identities.” […]
On the Shoulders of Others
Challenging the insularity of academic research is important for all fields, including the human sciences, as Kelly Baker writes in her recent post about Neil deGrasse Tyson. This departmental blog, and several others where faculty in the department publish (Culture on the Edge, Huffington Post, Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Thinking Out Loud . . .), are an aspect of this process of making scholarship accessible to a wider audience, as these sites attract non-academic readers, no matter how […]
The Rhetoric of Exceptionalism
The other day Inside Higher Ed posted an article that has now been re-posted at Slate. It’s one among many recent blogs that chronicles the longstanding difficulties of the academic job market, making evident the personal, social, and economic prices many people pay while trying to find work after earning their Ph.D. A much quoted line when friends post links to it on Facebook, from its second paragraph, reads as follows: Yet of all the machines that humanity has created, […]
The Humanities, the UK, and Southern Food
Prof. Richard King, professor of Buddhist and Asian Studies at the University of Kent, sits down to discuss his work, as well as the Humanities, higher education in the United Kingdom, and even veggie corndogs. Dr. King delivered the 12th annual Aronov Lecture, titled “From Mysticism to Spirituality: Colonial Legacies and the Reformulation of ‘the Mystic East,’” so be on the lookout for the posting of the lecture video. Also, check out this lecture getting some press in the UK. […]
UA at SECSOR
This past weekend, several faculty members and one former student presented research and networked with colleagues at the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion (SECSOR) Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Andie Alexander, a recent grad and office worker extraordinaire, presented a paper entitled “Shifting the Focus: Understanding the Teller Behind the Tale” for a Method and Theory in the Study of Religion undergraduate research panel. Dr. Finnegan presented a paper entitled “The Digital Discourses of Muslim Environmentalist,” which tracked […]
The Proclaimers
I’ve seen a lot of early career people teaching — of course, I was once one of them, like us all, back when, at the University of Tennessee in the early 1990s, I would write out entire lectures the day or night before and then read them each class, sticking closely to my text — and they unfortunately share a trait with some of their older, supposedly experienced colleagues: they’re proclaimers. Sitting at the back of a classroom, during the […]
Extra, Exatra: Idol Worshipers Make the News
THIMPHU, Bhutan (RNS) For centuries, Buddhists in this tiny landlocked Himalayan kingdom have had a special devotion to the most unusual of objects: the phallus. Painted on the walls of their homes, hanging from the eaves of their houses and seen in vehicles and on rooftops, images of the phallus are an essential part of Bhutan’s traditional ceremonies…. So opens a recent Huffington Post article, ripped straight from the 19th century’s headlines. For if you want to see how very […]
Competing Representations
T. Nicole Goulet is a Sessional Instructor at the University of Manitoba and Brandon University. Having completed her Ph.D. at the University of Manitoba on textual representations of Sarada Devi, Dr. Goulet continues her research on the intersection of colonial politics and religious practice in India, with special reference to gender. After an online conversation about the recent Doniger/Penguin affair it was evident that she had something new to say about this episode and so we invited this post. In […]
The Liberal Arts and the Job Market
Have you seen the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ report, “How Liberal Arts and Science Majors Fare in Employment“? Released near the end of January 2014, it’s conclusion states: […]