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upennrels.bsky.social
Penn Religious Studies
@upennrels.bsky.social
660 followers 320 following 110 posts
The Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

https://rels.sas.upenn.edu
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upennrels.bsky.social
Our next Religious Studies colloquium event!
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Moving Up the Cosmic Pole: Strategies for Legitimating Religious Authority in Buddhist Texts
RELS Colloquium
Ralph Craig (Whitman)
Nov 13, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204
November 10, 2025 at 11:17 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
A reminder that there is no RELS colloquium this week!

Our next colloquium event will be held on Thursday, Nov. 13. We’ll be hosting Prof. Ralph Craig (Whitman) who will be giving a talk titled Moving Up the Cosmic Pole: Strategies for Legitimating Religious Authority in Buddhist Texts.
November 3, 2025 at 10:13 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
Prof. Justin McDaniel led a group of graduate and undergraduate students on a trip to Bryn Athyn Cathedral and Glencairn Mansion in the Philadelphia suburbs this past weekend!

Students took a tour of the mansion and the cathedral and listened to a lecture on the history of the Swedenborgians.
Bryn Athyn Bryn Athyn Bryn Athyn Bryn Athyn
October 29, 2025 at 4:39 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
A reminder that we have no colloquium event this week! However, our affiliated program, the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, is holding a book event on Zoom with Prof. Ellen Muehlberger (Michigan) from 6:30–8:00 pm on Thursday, Oct. 30.

Details here:

rels.sas.upenn.edu/events/2025/...
October 27, 2025 at 10:58 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
Our colloquium event this week!
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Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health and Modernity in Indonesia
RELS Colloquium
Chiara Formichi (Cornell)
Oct 2, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204
Domestic Nationalism argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia’s progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. Women from all walks of life were called upon to fulfill domestic and motherly roles for the production and socialization of laborers, soldiers, and citizens, and pushed against the boundaries imposed on them by states and patriarchal orders. In this talk I will discuss how they rearticulated scientific mothering, nationalist maternalism, and Islamic ideals of motherhood to create a public voice through gendered care work, and the methodological challenges of doing so. Chiara Formichi is Director of the Religious Studies Program and Professor in Asian Studies at Cornell University. She specializes on Islam in Southeast Asia focusing on the intersection of religion, politics and society in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Chiara’s third monograph, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. Cosponsored by the Penn Forum for Global Islamic Studies
September 29, 2025 at 2:33 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
Happening this week in the Department of Religious Studies!
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Black Freedom and the Racialization of Religious Excitement
RELS Colloquium
Judith Weisenfeld @judithweisenfeld.com (Princeton)
Sep 25, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204
Black Freedom and the Racialization of Religious Excitement RELS Colloquium Judith Weisenfeld (Princeton) Sep 25, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, white American psychiatrists declared that mental illness among African Americans in the South had reached alarming proportions and argued that, in a notable percentage of these cases, “religious excitement” was the key precipitating factor. This talk explores late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind” and shows how the emerging specialty of psychiatry drew on works from history of religions to make racialized claims about African Americans’ “traits of character, habit, and behavior.” This history of the intersections of psychiatry and African American religions sheds light on how ideas about race, religion, and mental normalcy shaped African American experience in courts and mental hospitals and on the role the racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability. Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her books include Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, and Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake. Cosponsored by the Department of the History and Sociology of Science.
September 22, 2025 at 4:32 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
Our Religious Studies colloquium this week!

Islamic Law, History, and Class in Early Nineteenth Century India
Muhammad Qasim Zaman (Princeton)
Sep 18, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204

Cosponsored by the Department of South Asia Studies
September 15, 2025 at 10:09 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
Happening tomorrow! Our first RELS 2025–2026 colloquium featuring Elizabeth Ault @lizault.bsky.social (Senior Editor, Duke University Press @dukepress.bsky.social)!

How (and Why) to Write an Academic Book in Impossible Times

Thurs., Sept. 11, 3:30–5:00 pm
Cohen 392
How (and Why) to Write an Academic Book in Impossible Times RELS Colloquium Elizabeth Ault (Duke University Press) Sep 11, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 392 This talk will focus on some of the most common issues that first-time authors face during the writing and publishing process, including some broader discussion of the current environment facing scholars and publishers alike. Most of the session will focus on conversation intended to help junior (and other!) scholars consider the purpose and reach of their writing, as well as the nuts and bolts of finding the right publisher and working with an acquisitions editor. Please bring questions! Elizabeth Ault is a Senior Editor at Duke University Press, which she joined in 2012 after receiving her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Trained in an interdisciplinary field, she pursues projects that reach outward across disciplines and academic conversations in surprising ways (including work by activists and organizers), that connect historical and emerging conditions, and that are committed to engaging with race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. She works with the editors of several book series, including Practices , Black Feminism on the Edge, ASTERISK, Theory in Forms, and Camera Obscura . You can find Elizabeth at conferences about religion, American studies, women's studies, African studies, sociology, and geography, working with scholars in trans studies, disability studies, critical ethnic studies, Black geographies, witch studies, and more. N.B.: This event will be held in COHN 392! Cosponsored by the Department of Africana Studies, the Department of English, the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies/The Center for Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at Penn.
September 10, 2025 at 2:17 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
Mark your calendars for these other exciting events coming up in our colloquium series this semester!
The Sound of Mormonism RELS Colloquium Jared Farmer (Penn History) Dec 4, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204 In media studies, scholars use a special adjective to describe the kind of sound that is heard without the cause of the sound being seen: acousmatic. Latter-­day Saints have a distinctive record of producing as well as receiving such sounds. Jared Farmer’s research focuses on music and speech performances transmitted by radio waves from the Salt Lake Tabernacle, the temple of LDS broadcasting. Two programs stand out. One is General Conference, the semiannual gathering in April and October when the faithful listen—­in person or to a live transmission or to simulcast recordings on delayed broadcast—to solemn addresses by Church leaders, with choral interludes. The other is Music and the Spoken Word—radio’s longest-running program, which recently marked its 5,000th consecutive weekly broadcast—featuring the Tabernacle Organ and Choir at Temple Square, and an ecumenical message by a commenter. By studying the Mormon acousmatic, we can better understand relationships between religion, music, and vocality, and tensions between worshipful loudness and devotional quietude. Attendees are welcome to download and read Prof. Farmer's open-access book, The Sound of Mormonism: A Media History of Latter-Day Saints . Jared Farmer is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of five books, all of which, to some degree, concern the sacralization and desacralization of spaces and places. Image: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir at Mount Rushmore, July 23, 1962, performing as part of the first live transatlantic television broadcast using the Telstar 1 satellite. Link to "The Sound of Mormonism: A Media History of Latter-Day Saints" Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health and Modernity in Indonesia RELS Colloquium Chiara Formichi (Cornell) Oct 2, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204 Domestic Nationalism argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia’s progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. Women from all walks of life were called upon to fulfill domestic and motherly roles for the production and socialization of laborers, soldiers, and citizens, and pushed against the boundaries imposed on them by states and patriarchal orders. In this talk I will discuss how they rearticulated scientific mothering, nationalist maternalism, and Islamic ideals of motherhood to create a public voice through gendered care work, and the methodological challenges of doing so. Chiara Formichi is Director of the Religious Studies Program and Professor in Asian Studies at Cornell University. She specializes on Islam in Southeast Asia focusing on the intersection of religion, politics and society in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Chiara’s third monograph, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. Cosponsored by the Penn Forum for Global Islamic Studies Black Freedom and the Racialization of Religious Excitement RELS Colloquium Judith Weisenfeld (Princeton) Sep 25, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, white American psychiatrists declared that mental illness among African Americans in the South had reached alarming proportions and argued that, in a notable percentage of these cases, “religious excitement” was the key precipitating factor. This talk explores late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind” and shows how the emerging specialty of psychiatry drew on works from history of religions to make racialized claims about African Americans’ “traits of character, habit, and behavior.” This history of the intersections of psychiatry and African American religions sheds light on how ideas about race, religion, and mental normalcy shaped African American experience in courts and mental hospitals and on the role the racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability. Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her books include Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, and Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake. Islamic Law, History, and Class in Early Nineteenth Century India RELS Colloquium Muhammad Qasim Zaman (Princeton) Sep 18, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204 Muhammad Qasim Zaman This talk examines contestations in early nineteenth century India on the question of religiously-suspect innovations. While such contestations go back to early Islam, three things stand out in how the question was debated at the time under discussion here. At issue, first, were rival conceptions of Islam’s history. Second, latent in the anti-innovation campaign were some unexpected possibilities for growth and change in Islamic law in early colonial modernity. Third, there was a significant class dimension to these contestations, which sheds some new light on the backgrounds of the dueling camps and of those caught between them. Muhammad Qasim Zaman is Niehaus Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion at Princeton University. His writings include The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, and Islam in Pakistan. Among his current projects is a book on Islamic thought in early modern India.
September 8, 2025 at 12:48 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
The first RELS 2025–2026 colloquium is a special event with Elizabeth Ault @lizault.bsky.social (Senior Editor, Duke University Press @dukepress.bsky.social)!

How (and Why) to Write an Academic Book in Impossible Times
Thurs., Sept. 11, 3:30–5:00 pm
Cohen 392

rels.sas.upenn.edu/events/2025/...
How (and Why) to Write an Academic Book in Impossible Times RELS Colloquium Elizabeth Ault (Duke University Press) Sep 11, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 392 This talk will focus on some of the most common issues that first-time authors face during the writing and publishing process, including some broader discussion of the current environment facing scholars and publishers alike. Most of the session will focus on conversation intended to help junior (and other!) scholars consider the purpose and reach of their writing, as well as the nuts and bolts of finding the right publisher and working with an acquisitions editor. Please bring questions! Elizabeth Ault is a Senior Editor at Duke University Press, which she joined in 2012 after receiving her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Trained in an interdisciplinary field, she pursues projects that reach outward across disciplines and academic conversations in surprising ways (including work by activists and organizers), that connect historical and emerging conditions, and that are committed to engaging with race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. She works with the editors of several book series, including Practices , Black Feminism on the Edge, ASTERISK, Theory in Forms, and Camera Obscura . You can find Elizabeth at conferences about religion, American studies, women's studies, African studies, sociology, and geography, working with scholars in trans studies, disability studies, critical ethnic studies, Black geographies, witch studies, and more. N.B.: This event will be held in COHN 392! Cosponsored by the Department of Africana Studies, the Department of English, the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies/The Center for Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at Penn.
September 8, 2025 at 12:48 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
The Graduate Group in Religious Studies is delighted to announce two successful doctoral defenses over the past week! Congratulations, Dr. Abdul Manan Bhat and Dr. Hallie Nell Swanson! Read more about their projects here:

rels.sas.upenn.edu/news/2025/06...
June 25, 2025 at 7:22 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
Congratulations to Dr. Jeremy Steinberg, who successfully defended his dissertation "How the Bible Became Literature: Jewish Assumptions about the Nature of Text in the Hellenistic Period" this week!

rels.sas.upenn.edu/news/2025/04...
April 24, 2025 at 6:00 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
Our final colloquium event of the year takes place this Thursday!
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An Ethics of Completion: Russian Coloniality and Islamic Tradition in Kyrgyzstan
RELS Colloquium
Usmon Boron (@wolfhumanities.bsky.social)
Apr 24, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204
April 21, 2025 at 8:12 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
Coincidence, Contradiction, Affect: On Spirited Knowing
RELS Colloquium

Emily Ng (Penn Anthropology)
Apr 17, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204

A Zoom attendance option is available for this event. Please email Prof. Donovan Schaefer for the link.
April 14, 2025 at 4:22 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
"Toward the Human, After Man": A Sylvia Wynter Schematic
RELS Colloquium
Nathan Snaza (Richmond)
Apr 10, 2025 at 3:30pm–5:00pm | Cohen 204

There is a Zoom attendance option for this event. Please email Prof. Donovan Schaefer at doschaef@upenn.edu for the link.
April 7, 2025 at 2:37 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
There is NO Religious Studies colloquium this week!

Our next colloquium will take place on Thursday, April 10, from 3:30–5:00 pm in Cohen 204.

"Toward the Human, After Man: A Sylvia Wynter Schematic"
RELS Colloquium
Nathan Snaza (Richmond)
Apr 10, 2025 at 3:30pm–5:00pm | Cohen 204
March 31, 2025 at 8:37 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
Congratulations to alumnus Aditya Bhattacharjee (PhD 2023), who will be taking up a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities next year!

rels.sas.upenn.edu/news/2025/03...
March 31, 2025 at 12:45 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
RELS Colloquium This Week!

Reconfiguration and Revival: Newar Buddhist Traditions in the Kathmandu Valley (and Beyond)

Todd Lewis (Harvard/Holy Cross)
Mar 27, 2025 at 3:30pm-5:00pm | Cohen 204

rels.sas.upenn.edu/events/2025/...
March 24, 2025 at 3:42 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
The 2025 Boardman Symposium THE SCOPES TRIAL AT 100: SECULARISM, RACE, AND EDUCATION is happening this week!

This 1.5-day workshop will begin at 4pm on Thursday, March 20 and continue through Friday with a series of roundtable conversations.

Registration:

www.library.upenn.edu/america-250-...
March 17, 2025 at 4:24 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
There is no RELS colloquium this week, but our colleagues in the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins are hosting this talk with Pamela Klasova (Chicago) on Zoom tomorrow, March 6, at 6:30 pm!

No registration necessary. Use this link to join:

upenn.zoom.us/j/94938924535
March 5, 2025 at 5:29 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
The Department of Religious Studies is thrilled to announce that Prof. Reyhan Durmaz has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure!

Congratulations, Prof. Durmaz!
March 4, 2025 at 9:43 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
There is no RELS colloquium this week or next week!

Our next event will be our annual Boardman Symposium on March 20–21. We’ll begin at 4pm on Thursday, March 20, with some welcoming remarks and then a film screening and discussion of Inherit the Wind.
March 3, 2025 at 11:17 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
An exciting event this week! Our first RELS Emerging Scholar Colloquium!

INTELLIGENT ARTIFICE: SEDUCTION ALGORITHMS, MAGIC, AND COMPUTATIONAL MODERNITY
Suzanne van Geuns (Princeton)
Feb 27, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204

Email doschaef@upenn.edu for Zoom link.
February 24, 2025 at 9:57 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
We're extremely excited to formally announce our 2025 Boardman Symposium!

The Scopes Trial at 100: Secularism, Race, and Education
March 20–21, 2025
University of Pennsylvania, Van Pelt Library

Both in-person and online attendance options are available.

www.library.upenn.edu/events/ameri...
A red, white, and blue poster for THE SCOPES TRIAL AT 100: SECULARISM, RACE, AND EDUCATION, with a 1920s cartoon of an octopus labeled "Modernism"
February 20, 2025 at 4:47 PM
upennrels.bsky.social
We're honored to be hosting this @aarweb.bsky.social American Lectures in the History of Religion event this week!

Emilie Townes (Boston University School of Theology)
Wed., Feb. 19
3:30-5:00 with a reception to follow
Kislak Center, 6th Floor of Van Pelt Library
February 17, 2025 at 9:52 PM