Description:

In premodern Europe, almost everyone believed in the literal existence of an afterlife. This class asks how thinking about Heaven, Hell, and the apocalypse shaped attitudes towards the physical world from late antiquity to the 18th century. We trace how poets and natural philosophers dealt with these realms, and ask how ideas about nature and the body in turn shaped religious views. Topics include the challenge of squaring scientific texts with Scripture; the spiritual implications of medicine, astrology, alchemy, and magic; the physics of angels; demonic possession and mental health; and whether Heaven and Hell existed in physical space.

Sample Reading List:

• Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Celestial Hierarchy
• John Milton, Paradise Lost
• Nancy Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages
• Jan Machielsen, The Science of Demons
• Joad Raymond, Milton's Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination
• Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell

What was/is Roman religion? Our main focus in this course will be the nature, variety, and geographic range of the source material for religious practice in the Mediterranean world of the Roman Republic and Empire (6th c. BCE-5th c. CE). We'll examine how, and with what repercussions, Roman religion set the terms for and changed in response to Rome's expansion into a Mediterranean empire. Finally, we'll think about the place of "Roman religion" in the global history of religion, and the usefulness of the term "religion" to characterize how the Romans related to their gods.

This course will trace the history of Christianity in Africa from the first to twentieth centuries. We will focus on issues as diverse as the importance of Christians from Africa in the development of central Christian doctrines and institutions, the medieval Christian-Muslim encounter, the modern missionary movement, colonization and decolonization, the role of the church in freedom struggles, and more. We will ask the questions:how does studying the history of Christianity in Africa de-center Europe and the European experience in the history of Christianity? And:What would a global history of Christianity, pre-modern and modern, look like?

How have religious traditions addressed the relationship between human and non-human animals, and between non-human animals and the divine? What is the connection between representations of dominion over animals in religious texts, and the subjugation of women, the "racial" other, and marginalized peoples? Our focus will be on the ways in which non-human animals, real or imagined, have figured in the religious and moral traditions, as well as the cultural practices, of the Middle East and the west, from ancient times to the present. Course includes guest speakers and engagement with animal welfare groups that focus on religion/animal welfare.

We investigate the concept of “scientific objectivity” with special reference to its relationship to religious belief and practice. We begin with the revolt against scientific objectivity by 19th century religious thinkers such as Kierkegaard, and the impact this revolt might have had on the development of the sciences — in particular, on the major revolutions in physical science in the 20th century (Einstein’s relativity, and quantum physics). We conclude with a section on current affairs, in particular, the relationship of religious subjectivity to “post-truth” society.

In the liturgical and courtly culture of the Middle Ages, music and the visual arts were inseparable. To examine art and music together is the aim of this course, integrating these two fields of study as they were integrated in their historical context. Working through case studies from the ninth through the fifteenth centuries–including the mystic plays of Hildegard of Bingen, the scurrilous satire of the Roman de Fauvel, and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece–we focus on rich sites of intersection between art and music. Final and midterm projects creative and collaborative in nature.

Though it makes considerably fewer headlines than does Islamism (or Islamic fundamentalism), liberalism in its different shades has long been a highly significant facet of modern Islamic thought. This seminar is concerned with the history of Islamic liberalism in varied contexts (the Arab Middle East, Iran, India, Pakistan, and contemporary Western societies), the tensions and ambiguities that have characterized liberal thought, and the contestations within the ranks of the liberals and between them and their opponents from the late 19th century to the present.

A course on messianic, utopian, and revolutionary thought in and of the Caribbean. How is the idea of the Caribbean rooted in Christian thought? How have the Haitian and Cuban revolutions been shaped by religious iconography–from “voodoo” to the dove on Castro’s shoulder? What is the relation between a Dominican cult and US interventions in the region? In approaching these questions, we will pair a range of literary and historical readings with philosophical considerations of messianism’s and utopia’s relation to politics and time.

This course asked how “poetry,” both broadly and specifically conceived, succeeded and failed in consoling and sustaining humankind and interpreting life in the nineteenth century. What do poetry and religion borrow from one another? How does the history of the two together help us to understand the fate of each in the twentieth century?

The seminar examined illness experiences and therapeutic practices as related to religious traditions worldwide. The students specifically looked at the mind-body interface amid suffering to investigate how new medical technologies intermingle with belief systems and local forms of care. They considered how the themes of sacrifice and salvation are actualized in humanitarian and global health interventions and theorize emerging notions of wellbeing and human agency. Students learned to analyze representations of religion experience and the conduct ethnographic interviews.

This course traced an intellectual history of the modern doctrine of nonviolence, emphasizing its emergence through transnational, multi-religious dialogue. Topics included nonviolence in Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism; Hume and Spinoza; Max Müller; Theosophy and South Asian religious reformers; Transcendentalism; Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King.

This seminar will offer students an opportunity to engage critically, and above all historically, with the relationship between science and religion in the modern (post-1500) world. Has this relationship been uniformly antagonistic? If so, why? If not, what general conditions or specific problems have led to other forms of engagement? We will read a set of recent secondary studies on these questions, as well as primary sources from key episodes of entanglement between theistic institutions (practices, commitments, etc.) and self-consciously scientific modernity.