Tag: Origins


We Can’t Leave Tesla Alone

Madeleine Lewis graduated from UA in 2017 with degrees Religious Studies and Applied Mathematics. She is now teaching English and Computer Science in Montenegro with the Fulbright Program. This past September, Elon Musk tweeted, “Finally, we will do Nikola Tesla proud by having his cars in his countries of origin!” This claim about beginnings, coupled with the fact that I have lived in what some people assert to be Tesla’s singular country of origin for over a year, sparked my […]

Read More from We Can’t Leave Tesla Alone

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. […]

Read More from Country Music

Culture on the Edge: An Origin Story

Last week, Professors Steven Ramey and Vaia Touna sat down to discuss their involvement with the Culture on the Edge research group and blog, along with their two book series. Though the discussion was intended to focus on Prof. Touna’s recent addition to the published series, it naturally led to a conversation on the implications of fabricating origins and identity. […]

Read More from Culture on the Edge: An Origin Story

In Search of…

Students in REL 490 are currently reading a couple of essays by Joseph Kitagawa (d. 1992), longtime (and influential) faculty member at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School (from his 1987 collection), to help set the stage for our eventual reading of some of the works by the late Jonathan Z. Smith. In Kitagawa’s essay, “The History of Religions in America” (1959 — originally published in that once influential set of essays on methodology), we find the following: [O]ne must […]

Read More from In Search of…

A Lesson on Origins at #REL50th

Our 50th anniversary celebrations have come to an end (but we’ll post a fun fact each Monday for the rest of the semester) — and, if you ask me, it was a great success. We filmed parts of it (i.e., the two faculty lectures, by Profs. Altman and Trost, and the opening to the next night’s Grad Tales panel — featuring five grads who returned to help mark the occasion [scroll down here to see who they were]); these movies […]

Read More from A Lesson on Origins at #REL50th

Jim and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

In the close to Fabricating Origins — a recent collection of short essays, by a wide array of scholars, on the problem of origins — I used the example of Jim and Pam, from the U.S. adaptation of the British series, “The Office,” to illustrate how malleable, and thus useful, the archive of the past can be in our efforts to make sense of where we happen to find ourselves today. For all I know I’ve blogged about it before […]

Read More from Jim and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Weaving the Thread of Oregon’s Origins

By Jared Powell Jared Powell is a senior from Canton, Mississippi majoring in English and Religious Studies If you follow college football, like most folks around here do, then you’ve surely heard a thing or two about the Oregon Ducks. Oregon has carved their place as one of the most successful college teams of the past five years with an imagined rivalry with the Tide (“We want Bama” anyone?), but they also make waves week in and week out with their […]

Read More from Weaving the Thread of Oregon’s Origins