Tag: Conferences


Bringing REL to San Diego–#aarsbl19 #naasr2019

November is in full swing, and that means it is annual meeting season for scholars of religion. The North American Association for the Study of Religion, the American Academy of Religion, and the Society of Biblical Literature will all conference in San Diego, November 23-26. Many of our REL faculty and graduate students will be on the program. Learn a bit more about what they’ll be up to and where you can find them. […]

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It’s Worth Taking A Closer Look

The 2019 call for papers has just come out from NAASR — the North American Association for the Study of Religion — asking for respondents to invited papers that will each address one of four aspects of the field in which we do our work (a format the meetings have used for the past 5 years); the association also announced its upcoming workshops for grad students, all of which will take place at its November annual meeting in San Diego. […]

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How to Make More from More? the Large Conference Loner Challenge

How to make more from more

“Less is better” is a dictum that doesn’t just haunt Matt Sheedy. I feel as though that spectral proverb from J.Z. Smith may apply as much to conferences as the classroom. The phrase resonates with my cultural heritage, too.  There’s a cookbook title, famous among certain generations of Mennonites, that encapsulates the bent of that culture: “More-with-Less.” Conferences come in a variety of sizes. Some are attended in the dozens to hundreds whereas others tip past the thousands. Each conference ranges between […]

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The Conference: A Response

By Andie Alexander Andie Alexander earned her B.A. in Religious Studies and History in 2012. She is pursuing her Ph.D. in American Religious Cultures at Emory University. Andie also works as the online Curator for the Culture on the Edge blog. The other day I was listening to the recent Dept. of Religious Studies podcast about conferences, more specifically about the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (the national conference for our field’s main professional organization) and SECSOR (the […]

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REL Heads to Texas for the American Academy of Religion

Something happens every weekend before Thanksgiving. No, not the cupcake tune up game before the Iron Bowl. It’s the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the national scholarly society for the academic study of religion. This weekend many of the faculty from REL are headed to San Antonio for the meeting and they have some pretty interesting plans. […]

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10 Tips for Attending an Academic Conference from REL Majors

This past weekend a group of REL faculty and majors traveled down I-20 to Atlanta to attend the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion (SECSOR), the regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Through the magic of Twitter, here is a list of tips for the next time you attend an academic conference. […]

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REL Faculty Stay Class in San Diego

Don’t be surprised if a few offices are empty next week. Many of our wonderful REL faculty will be spending November 22-25 in sunny San Diego for the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature or AAR/SBL for short or #SBLAAR14 for hashtag. What will our faculty be doing in San Diego? Glad you asked. Some will be giving papers or talks to other scholars and sharing the research they’ve been doing. Others […]

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Patience is a Professional Virtue

Some years ago I met a grad student at the U.S.’s main national scholarly conference in our field — “the big show” is what we’d call it if we were baseball players — who knew some of my friends in the profession and who bumped into me while walking through the book display. Being new to the conference-scene, he asked me a question: So how do I present a paper here next year? […]

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