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Desire and Intimacy in the Study of Religion

2024 Fall Graduate Student Conference

October 25-27, 2024 

This conference will explore how desire and intimacy shape religious lives and the scholars who study them. Desire and intimacy is everywhere—in the intimacy of a child as she holds a statue, or in a mosque where two men kiss, or in a church as a Palestinian minister speaks of his desire for peace—yet this theme has rarely been foregrounded in Religious Studies. This conference is oriented around a set of questions. First, attuned to bodily intimacies, including intimacies forged between humans as well as humans and their gods, saints, and spirits, we ask: How do touch, glances, and words create intimacies and desires between   religious subjects? How do religious institutions, texts, and families foreclose certain forms of desire, especially that of marginalized people? And how do intimacy and desire exist as sites of possibility and violence in the study of religion? Second, this conference is invested in the realm of the political. How do religious subjects navigate and fight for their political desires? How are politico-religious desires forged within such locations as poetry, literature, law, activism, and art? Finally, this conference attends to our own desires as scholars of religion. How do desire and intimacy shape our own experiences as scholars? What happens when scholarly desire comes up against realities of fieldwork or the archive? What happens when we feel we have become too close to a text or group of people? Our conference will address these pressing questions. 

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This event is co-sponsored by:

Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities; Asian American Studies Program; Buffett Institute for Global Affairs; Department of Anthropology; Department of Asian Languages and Cultures; Department of Political Science; Department of Religious Studies; Department of Black Studies; Department of Philosophy; Gender & Sexuality Studies Program; Global Politics and Religion Research Group; Middle East and North African Studies Program (MENA); South Asia Research Forum; The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN); and, The Weinberg Center for International and Area Studies.