Founded in 1891 to encourage path-breaking scholarship through a lecture and book series, the American Lectures in the History of Religions flourished under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies and Columbia University from 1936. At the request of the ACLS, the American Academy of Religion assumed administrative responsibility for the series in 1994.

2026 Lecturer 

Dr. Annette Yoshiko Reed, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity and Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School

Lecture Abstract:
If we only had Jewish literature from Late Antiquity, we would have no idea that Christians or Christianity even existed. In this lecture, "Disembodying Diversity," Annette Yoshiko Reed revisits the supposed Rabbinic "silence" about Christianity with an eye to its productive theoretical potential for unsettling the taxonomies commonly taken for granted in Religious Studies. To attend to different theories of identity and difference, Reed argues, is to reveal the degree to which late antique Christian heresiology has shaped modern scholarly approaches to identity and difference but also to reorient debates about defining "religion."

The guests are welcome to join in-person or via livestream. The livestream link will be posted the day of the lecture on this page.

LIVE WEBINAR