Category: Student Blog

Posts in this category are written by, or are about, undergraduate students in the Department.


The REL Journal Group: Reading Amid the (phenomenological) Lines

The following exchange between Prof. Nathan Loewen and Emma Gibson, a graduate student in our MA program, reflects on the recent meeting of REL’s monthly journal reading group, part of our Religion in Culture MA. Nathan: So, Emma, you have a background in the study of philosophy and you came to the religious studies department at UA in order to complete an MA in religious studies. Your first semester at UA has included plenty of coursework on critical theory as well […]

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Road Trip

Early Monday morning my advisor, Russell McCutcheon, and I traveled down the road and across the state line to visit Mississippi State University. Since my acceptance into the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama’s new M.A. program a few months ago, Russell and I have been discussing the possibility of having Dr. Mary Rebecca Read-Wahidi serve on my advisory committee. Dr. Read-Wahidi attended the University of Alabama for her Ph.D. in Anthropology and was advised under Dr. Bill […]

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The New Triple Threat: Programming Omeka

Our Public Humanities and Religious Studies class built a digital collection of @AARWeb material culture: https://t.co/1bzVzAf1cC #aarsbl17 — UA Dept. of REL (@StudyReligion) October 23, 2017 You may have seen this tweet. As part of the Public Humanities and Religious Studies foundations course in our MA program, I collaborated with Sierra Lawson and Emma Gibson and helped to build AARtifacts. The project was built in Omeka and is meant to represent interesting artifacts gathered from people’s experiences of the annual […]

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A Student Report from WordCamp Birmingham

This past weekend (October 21-22), I attended the annual WordPress conference in Birmingham, Alabama: WordCamp Birmingham. You may be asking: If she’s in an MA program for Religion in Culture, why does she need to go to a WordPress conference? An important aspect of the program is a focus on digital and public humanities — how we convey our research through digital media and to unconventional audiences. Part of that focus results in developing digital skills like WordPress to present […]

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The REL Journal Group: Durkheim and Data Edition

The following exchange between Prof. Mike Altman and Sarah Griswold, a student in our MA program, reflects on the recent meeting of the journal reading group, part of our Religion in Culture MA. Mike Altman: Sarah, for our first journal reading group you chose the article “Durkheim with Data: The Databse of Religious History” from a recent issue of JAAR. What’s the gist of the article and why did you think we should read it in our group of MA students […]

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