Colloquia and Reading Groups for the 2016-17 Academic Year

August 29, 2016
Colloquia and Reading Groups for the 2016-17 Academic Year

The Center is happy to announce three colloquia and reading groups for the 2016-17 academic year. These are open only to Harvard faculty and doctoral students, or by special permission from the conveners.

Comparative Studies Colloquium

This colloquium has met for four years. It brings together faculty, doctoral students, visiting scholars, and select Masters students. Most participants are at Harvard, but scholars from neighboring institutions also are welcome. The colloquium is dedicated to comparative study broadly conceived, across the disciplines in the study of religion, theology, and related fields, including both textual studies, ethnographic studies, and work in other media. These monthly conversations provide the opportunity for professors and students to share work in progress – from initial ideas to nearly completed works – and receive the comments and insights of others interested in the possibilities and problems accruing to comparative study.

For more information, contact Professor Francis X. Clooney, fclooney@hds.harvard.edu (co-convener Professor Kimberley Patton is on sabbatical during 2016-17)

First meeting: Monday, September 19, 5-630 (organizational meeting, updates on current projects, and conversation on current issues in comparative studies) (light refreshments)

The Material Religion Reading Group

The Material Religion Reading Group met throughout the 2015-2016 academic year, and engaged a series of authors whose works are now listed in the vast and ill-defined area designated as “neo-materialism.” Given the specific intellectual interests of the participants, such theoretical insights have been explored by highlighting their potential contribution towards the study of religion. The group read in the Fall 2015 Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and Manuel Vasquez’s More Than Religion. The Spring semester 2016 has been entirely devoted to a close engagement with the very complex, but also highly inspiring work of Karen Barad through the reading of several short pieces and also of her major contribution Meeting the Universe Halfway.

For 2016-17, several new authors have been suggested for reading, in particular with the goal of moving the conversation more explicitly towards a direct application to the study of religion. Among the potential reading subjects for a new year are Jennifer Hughes’s Biography of a Mexican Crucifix (the author, who has written extensively on the topic of a materialist approach to the study of religion will be fellow of the Radcliffe institute next year), John Robb and Oliver Harris’s The Body in History, Hans Gumbrecht’s The Powers of Philology, and Yi-Jan Lin’s The Erotic Life of Manuscripts, among others.   

For more information, contact Professor Giovanni Battista Bazzana gbazzana@hds.harvard.edu

First meeting: Friday, September 23, 12-2, CSWR Conference Room (light lunch provided)

The Literature and Theology Colloquium

The Literature and Theology colloquium wagers that some of the most exciting theology might be happen in and in conversation with contemporary literature. It will gather monthly to read one recent novel or collection of short stories and discuss the text with an eye toward theology, apophatic/kataphatic language, questions of presence and absence, desire, the porousness of the self, theological and liturgical secrecy, and modern forms of theodicy and responses to suffering and/or trauma.

For more information, contact: Michael Motia, PhD Candidate michaelmotia@fas.harvard.edu

First meeting: Monday, September 12, 4-530pm, CSWR Conference Room (light refreshments)

Text: Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood