DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

2024-2025 Course Descriptions

Courses primarily for:

• Undergraduate students
• Undegraduate-level courses available to graduate students
• Graduate students

Courses Primarily for Undergraduate Students

REL-101-7-21 – Epics of Ancient India: The Mahabharata and Ramayana

(Fall 2024, Professor Mark McClish)

Ancient India produced two of the world's great epics: the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. The former tells the story of an apocalyptic civil war within a ruling dynasty that comes to engulf all of the peoples of the world. The latter tells the story of the righteous king, Rāma, and the abduction of his beloved wife, Sītā, by the demon-king Rāvaṇa. Both stories have edified audiences, in different versions, for over two-millennia, and both are considered by many to be sacred texts that reveal deep truths about the nature of human existence. In this course, we will read abridged translations of the classical Sanskrit versions of both stories, reflect on their meaning, and explore their continuing significance in different forms to audiences today.

REL-101-7-20 – Learning Spaces, Learned Bodies

(Fall 2024, Professor Shira Schwartz)
This is a College Seminar on the relationship between the body, space, and learning. While education and college are often presented as primarily intellectual activities, we will pay attention to the spatial and bodily dynamics that shape how we create, share and access knowledge. Using a range of creative assignments and multi-modal interdisciplinary sources, we will approach the body and space as places where learning happens, and therefore as categories through which we can analyze how learning happens, including in our very own classroom and on campus. Students will learn to ask how the body shapes and is shaped by its learning environment through categories like gender/sex and sexuality, race/ethnicity and religion, ability and access, and how fields like architecture, design, technology and media influence the enterprise of learning. Students will learn to re-examine their most basic assumptions about learning in a variety of expected and unexpected settings, like libraries and maker spaces, rabbinic bathrooms and football fields, science labs and ancient Greek life, in order to prepare for a range of learning experiences that they may encounter at Northwestern, and beyond. The course will guide students to be more attuned to the social and material dynamics that may otherwise go unrecognized in these experiences, teaching critical skills that will prepare them to be more conscious learners. It will appeal to students with a wide-range of academic interests across the humanities, arts and sciences, and to anyone interested in asking big questions about learning through different time periods and fields of study.

REL-101-8-20 (RLP) – First-Year Writing Seminar: American Borders: History, Politics, Religion (RLP)

(Winter 2025, Professor Elizabeth Hurd)
This course is a study of American borders, past and present. We read widely in politics, history, religious and cultural studies, anthropology, and border studies. We watch several documentary films, listen to music, and learn from engaging with guest speakers. Central themes include the history of US borders with Mexico, Indigenous communities, protest movements, law and the border, sanctuary and sovereignty, legal exceptionalism, the history of the passport, religious politics of borders, and environmental politics of the borderlands. Border issues are considered from multiple perspectives, including but also going well beyond issues of surveillance and enforcement. As a first-year seminar, this course also emphasizes critical research and writing skills to prepare students for college-level research and writing. We will discuss academic integrity and get tips from a librarian on how to make the most of the University Library’s resources during your time at Northwestern. *Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.

REL-101-8-23 – First-Year Writing Seminar: Religion and Horror

(Spring 2025, Dr. Lily Stewart)

REL 170-20 – Introduction to the Study of Religion

(Winter 2025, Professor James Bielo)

This course will guide students through a series of case studies that highlight the practical, ethical, and material dimensions of religions around the world. These case studies dramatize how religions are lived with and against the grain of established doctrine, so that students will gain a richer understanding of the ways religious customs have shaped the world around them. We will focus on three interrelated areas where religion has had a significant impact: (1) sexuality and gender, (2) health and medicine, and (3) law and politics. The course also serves to introduce students to the basic methods scholars employ to study religion, including history, ethnography, textual analysis, ritual theory, phenomenology, and comparison—tools through which students will formulate their own accounts of religious phenomena.

REL 172-20 – Introduction to Religion, Media, and Culture

(Spring 2025, Professor Sarah Taylor)
Dive into one of today’s most exciting and rapidly growing areas of scholarship – the intriguing entanglements of religion and media in society and culture. This course draws from an array of sources, such as television, film, and radio, digital gaming worlds, billboards, advertisements and media campaigns, popular music, streaming video, social media, and even tattoos, body art, and graffiti. Study media while getting to make your own media for course projects!

REL 200-20 – Introduction to Hinduism

(Fall 2024, Professor Mark McClish)

One of the largest and most ancient of all religions, Hinduism comprises a family of related traditions. Over the last 5000 years, the Hindu traditions of South Asia have developed a remarkable diversity of rituals, beliefs, and spiritual practices and a pantheon of hundreds and thousands of gods and goddesses, from the elephant headed Ganeṣa to the fierce goddess Kālī as well as many local deities. This course will examine the breadth of the Hindu traditions as they have developed over time, highlighting the major elements that characterize them collectively, such as ritual sacrifice (yajña), world renunciation (saṃnyāsa), law (dharma), spiritual discipline (yoga), devotion (bhakti), worship (pūjā), and theology. During the course we will explore both the scriptures of Hinduism as well as its practices. We will pay particular attention to how these traditions have contributed to the development of modern Hinduism.

REL 210-20 – Introduction to Buddhism

(Fall 2024, Professor Kevin Buckelew)
This course offers an introduction to Buddhist history, culture, philosophy, and practice. We explore the major doctrinal varieties of Buddhism, from its inception through the rise of the Mahayana and Tantric or Vajrayana traditions. At the same time, we also investigate Buddhist visual, material, and ritual cultures—which offer windows onto aspects of Buddhism as a lived religion not always visible in scriptural sources. In the process we engage themes like the meaning of suffering, the cosmology of cyclical rebirth, the social role of monasticism and its intervention in traditional family structures, the place of women and gender in Buddhism, the relationship between religious ideals and everyday life, the question of self-reliance versus divine assistance, and the power of images and icons. Our readings of primary sources offer close engagement with Buddhist ideas and practices, allowing us to understand how the religion shaped the ways people in pre-modern Asia saw and interacted with their worlds. Readings in secondary scholarship help us set these materials in historical context and connect them to the bigger picture of Buddhism’s spread across Asia.

REL 210-21 – Introduction to Buddhism

(Spring 2025, Professor Sarah Jacoby)

REL 220-20 – Introduction to Hebrew Bible

(Spring 2025, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)

REL 221-20 – Introduction to New Testament

(Fall 2024, Dr. Lily Stewart)

The New Testament has influenced the lives and experiences of individuals and communities across the globe for thousands of years. It has served as a source of structure, meaning, and hope for many while also influencing ideologies and practices of bigotry and violence. But what do we really know about the world in which the New Testament was produced? What was the project of Jesus and his followers and why was it so polarizing? What authors composed the New Testament’s texts and what can we glean about their audiences and motivations? Why were some texts chosen for the canon of the New Testament and others left out?

This course will consider the New Testament from a range of vantage points. We will use historical methodologies to explore the complex networks of religious practices, cultural ideologies, and political actors that influenced its production. We will also consider how the New Testament has been read and reproduced in the past 2000 years. We will discuss a range of theological perspectives, analyze the impact of the New Testament on art and literature, and assess its role in global politics. Students will be exposed to interpretations of the New Testament from the perspectives of eco criticism, queer theory, disability theory, and liberation theology, among other critical lenses.

REL 230-20 – Introduction to Judaism

(Winter 2025, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)

 This course attempts to answer the questions "What is Judaism?" and "Who is a Jew?" by surveying the broad arc of Jewish history, reviewing the practices and beliefs that have defined and continue to define Judaism as a religion, sampling the vast treasure of Jewish literatures, and analyzing the unique social conditions that have made the cultural experience of Jewishness so significant. The class will employ a historical structure to trace the evolutions of Jewish literature, religion, and culture through the ages.

REL 240-20 – Introduction to Christianity

How many ways are there to be a Christian? What counts as Christianity, what doesn’t, and who ultimately gets to decide? Where and when does Christian practice take place and what does it look like? How has Christianity been shaped by cultures around the world, and how has it shaped those cultures in return?

This class explores Christianity from a perspective of religious diversity. Using case studies from documentaries, podcasts, scriptures, scholarly articles, short stories, music videos, and films, students will encounter a variety of Christian lifeways, practices, beliefs, and identities. They will consider how important concepts in Christianity—like faith, sacrifice, and sanctity—have been variously defined and experienced across Christian communities. We will ask what factors account for the broad range of Christian doctrines and denominations, and analyze the anxieties, conflicts, and points of creativity have arisen out of this diversity.

REL 250-20 / MENA 290-5-1 – Introduction to Islam

(Fall 2024, Professor Usman Hamid)

This course is an introduction to the study of Islam, one of the major religious traditions of world history. It adopts an interdisciplinary framework for understanding Islam as a lived tradition by focusing on the debates and practices that have animated Muslim religious life across time and geography. We will examine religious texts alongside material evidence, historical research, and ethnographic studies. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which Muslims have engaged with the Qur’an and the life and legacy of the Prophet Muhammad, the practice of Islamic ritual, piety, and devotion, as the place of Islamic law in everyday life. Through this course, students will develop critical vocabulary necessary for understanding Islamic discourses and practices, as well as facility with the theoretical language in the study of religion.

REL 262-0-20 / BLK_ST 262-20 – Introduction to Black Religions: The North American Experience

(Winter 2025, Professor KB Dennis Meade)

This course introduces you to the variety of Black religions that developed during and after the Atlantic slave trade up to the present in what is now the United States. The historical contexts surrounding the development of Black religions and the lived experiences of Black Americans are the main topics of our course. The course orients us to these traditions as continuities/changes of West African religious cosmologies. We explore the impact of the Atlantic slave trade, the role of politics, the construction of racial identities, and most importantly, the diversity of Black Religion in the United States and locally in Chicago. We will examine the interplay between religion, and race within various forms of Christianity, Islam, and American expressive cultures.

REL-318-20-f24-buckelew – Fate, Fortune, and Karma in East Asia

(Fall 2024, Professor Kevin Buckelew)

Are our actions free or fated? What larger forces shape the choices we make? To what do we owe our successes, and what is to blame for our mistakes? In East Asian religions, such questions have been answered with reference to a variety of different concepts of fate, fortune, and karma. These concepts shape not only how people have viewed the world, but also how they have made their way through life. This class focuses on religious approaches to questions of destiny in premodern East Asia. We begin by studying Indian Buddhist ideas of karma and early Chinese notions of fate and fortune preceding Buddhism's arrival in China, then turn to the ways people in China and Japan negotiated these various concepts over the many centuries following the arrival of Buddhism. In the end, we discover important throughlines amid the diversity of religious responses to the problem of destiny in East Asian history.

REL 318-21 – Religion and Politics in the People's Republic of China (RLP)

REL 319-23 – Buddhist Literature in Translation

REL 319-24 / HUM 370-5-30 – Being Human in a More Than Human World

REL 345-20 – Sainthood and the Body (RHM, RSG)

What kinds of bodies can be saintly? How do saintly people interact with their bodies? What do modern celebrities like Beyonce and Tupac Shakur have in common with the saints? Why is there a patron saint of stomachaches?  

This course explores the complex relationship between saints and their bodies in Christian history. Saints have long represented the extremes of Christian excellence, in large part because their lives and bodies interrogate the boundaries between heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, masculine and feminine, holy and transgressive, life and death. Saints facilitate incredible miracles, perform painful and sometimes disgusting acts of asceticism, and experience mystically erotic relationships with the divine. Even as saints live to deny their bodies, their bodies are nevertheless foundational to their sanctity, both before and after death. In this class, we will explore how and why certain exceptional individuals came to be regarded as saints; the ways in which the body was central to living a saintly life and maintaining a connection to the world after death; how religious communities developed around saints and the body; how saints used their bodies to serve their broader communities; and how ideas about sainthood, sanctity, and the body developed in relation to changing cultural movements, social interests, and local ideals. Our class will explore case studies from the ancient to the modern world, with a special focus on the middle ages.  *Counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentrations.

REL 349-20 – Medicine, Miracles, and Magic: Healthcare in the Middle Ages (RHM)

(Winter 2025, Dr. Lily Stewart)

Today, religion and science are often regarded as separate spheres of knowledge and practice, but was this always the case? In this class, we will explore the overlapping uses of medicine, miracles, and magic in premodern healthcare. We will ask what kinds of people were able to practice medicine (priests? physicians? nuns? magicians?), why a person’s barber was also their surgeon, how the dead supported the health of the living, and why rituals like confession could treat stomach aches and other ailments. 

We will learn what a vial of urine could tell a medieval physician about a patient’s habits, consider how an individual’s astrological sign influenced their treatment plan, and discuss what an excess of garlic in a person’s diet might tell us about the moral state of their spirit. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and analyze the complex, nuanced systems that medieval people used to theorize the body and its relationship to the soul, and will be able to articulate how physical, spiritual, and even supernatural medicines were often combined to treat both.

As we study the nuances of premodern medicine, we will also work to rethink the relationship between religion and science in our own world, and consider whether and where our modern healthcare practices align with the past as much as they depart from it.

Counts toward Religion, Health, and Medicine (RHM) major concentration.

REL 349-21 – What is Christian Nationalism?

(Spring 2025, Professor James Bielo)

REL 349-22 – Blood and Christianity: A History in Substance (RHM, RSG)

(Spring 2025, Dr. Lily Stewart)
Whether it causes fear or fascination, blood holds a mysterious sway on the modern imagination. From those who faint at the sight of it, to those who love vampire movies and gory thrillers, to those who study and analyze it in labs, this strange substance serves as a constant source of conflict, anxiety, and ideology. Representations of blood in Christian art, literature, and theology have been just as fraught. Ancient and medieval Christians saw the substance as alternately miraculous and polluting, life-giving and death-bringing, a marker of difference and a symbol of unity. Blood had the capacity to reveal whether a person was sick or healthy, whether they were sexually active, what god they worshipped, and even whether they were guilty of murder. If it was shed on a battlefield it was considered valiant; if it was shed from the bodies of virgins or martyrs it was considered holy; if it was shed during childbirth or menstruation it was considered polluting; and if it was shed in pursuit of love it was considered romantic. The Christian language of blood and blood purity crept into developing ideas about race and sexuality, forging links between morality and embodiment that have in turn informed understandings of biology and human difference.

In this class, we will explore these complex and often contradictory representations of blood and bloodshed in Christian history. By approaching this topic from a range of sources and theoretical perspectives we will use blood as a starting point for exploring broader questions about gender, religion, race, culture, and individuality. Moreover, we will consider how historical assessments of blood value, purity, and pollution continue to shape constructions of identity today.

*Counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentrations.

REL 354-20 – Sufism

(Fall 2024, Professor Usman Hamid)

This course introduces Sufism, the ‘mystical' tradition of Islam. After critically examining the concept of ‘mysticism' within Religious Studies, we will examine the historical origins of Sufism, its emergence from and relationship to foundational discourses within Islam, its engagement with the Qur'an, and the figure of the Prophet Muhammad in Sufi devotions. We will then investigate notions of ‘sainthood' in Islam, the roles of Sufism in popular Muslim piety, the centrality of the body and bodily disciplines in Sufi practice, and the writings produced by Sufis, their supporters, and critics. Particular attention will be paid to the study of Sufi literature both in prose and poetry. The course will offer a broad introduction to the historical and geographic range of Sufism in Islam, but will give special attention to Sufi traditions in the Indian subcontinent and the broader Persianate world.

REL 359-20 – Biblical Prophets in Islam

(Spring 2025, Professor Usman Hamid)

REL 360-20 – Race, Religion, & Digital Humanities

(Fall 2024, Professor KB Dennis Meade)
Black and Caribbean Studies are vibrant fields in the digital humanities. The study of religion in the digital humanities, however, remains an emergent field. This course is an ambitious attempt at interdisciplinarity, or more aptly what Tracy Hucks and Dianne Stewart refer to as transdisciplinarity--inquiry driven research that transcends disciplinary silos. This course centers religion as the primary lens to excavate and recover representations of Afro-Caribbean religions and their North American cognates using archival sources, fiction, film, and art. Religion will serve as the framework to interrogate what counts as data, the sources in which we can locate this data, its deployment and (re)presentation. Our aim is to gain a landscape view of Caribbean
religious history through key moments and themes from the period of enslavement and what Rinaldo Walcott refers to as the long emancipation. The course will provide students the opportunity to explore current digital projects and learn digital tools to generate their own inquiries. Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.

REL 369-20 – Topics in American Religion

(Spring 2025, James Bielo)

REL 371-20 – Religion, Film, TV: The Spirit of Horses (RHM)

(Fall 2024, Professor Sarah Taylor)

It is often said that in riding a horse “we borrow freedom.” From winged Pegasus of Greek mythology, to mystical Kelpies of Celtic lore, to the Hippogriffs in Harry Potter, horses hold a special allure for humans that transcends cultures. Come explore the power of the sacred human-horse bond as represented in art, film, and popular culture. Come learn about the use of horses in healing veterans with PTSD as we visit “Brave Hearts,” the country’s largest healing horsemanship program right here in Illinois. Do “horse whisperers” truly exist? What do we make of divine horses portrayed in myth and symbol, horses as spiritual teachers, practices of horse meditation and healing, spiritual journeys with horses, ghost horses, and those who practice horsemanship as a spiritual life path? Delight in discovering just what it is about horses that fascinates us, captures our hearts, and fuels our imaginations. *Counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) .

REL 371-21 – Religion, Film, TV: Religion, Existentialism and Film

(Winter 2025, Professor Michelle Molina)

In the aftermath of the World War I, many artists and filmmakers asked new questions about the relationship between realism and religion. Could one reconcile concrete reality (or realism) with faith in the other-worldly? Many of the artists under discussion in the course drew upon themes that had already been raised by Kierkegaard in the 19th century. What was the relationship between religion and modernity, faith and ethics, reality and the supernatural, observable phenomena and invisible causes? How did one make sense of death in a meaningless universe? Was the universe meaningless? Could meaning be found in realism itself? Through engagement with films by directors ranging from Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ingmar Bergman, to Woody Allen and Harold Ramis, we will study mid-to-late 20th century films whose common theme is the quest to understand the meaning of life, either actively through taking up religious life, or because the protagonists consider themselves inhabiting a godless and meaningless universe. Class will be discussion-based, with a few short lectures to set up pertinent themes. Class readings will include Kierkegaard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, among others. *Registration By Instructor Permission Only.

REL 376-20 – Christianity and the Making of Modernity

(Spring 2025, Professor Christine Helmer)

REL 379-20 / BLK_ST 315-20 / LATIN_AM 391-2 – Religions of the Caribbean (RLP)

(Fall 2024, Prof. Dennis Meade)
The Caribbean constitutes a unique space to understand the history of resistance and social change in the Black Atlantic world. Going beyond the tropes of reggae, Rastafari, and tourism--this course provides an introduction to the diversity of religious traditions in the region, with a particular focus on Afro-Caribbean religious practices and spiritual technologies. Students will explore the cosmological features and embodied expressions that characterize these traditions. Through presentations, discussions, and writing assignments students will reflect on concepts such as belonging, migration, colonialism, race, class, and gender to understand the political and cultural implications of religion in the region. *Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.

REL 379-21 – Exhibiting Religion

(Winter 2025, Professor James Bielo)
In this course students will explore diverse representations of religion in museum settings and other contexts of public display. Student research will include engagement with Chicago area museums, and the opportunity to design their own exhibit.

REL 379-22 – Refugees, Migration & Exile: Digital Humanities Workshop

(Winter 2025, Professor Michelle Molina)

REL 379-23 – Mediating Religion

(Winter 2025, Professor Usman Hamid)

REL 395-20 – Theories of Religion (Senior Capstone Seminar)

(Winter 2025, Professor Sarah Taylor)
What is "theory"? What does it mean to have a theory about something? How are theories helpful? What do theories do? What is "religion"? How do things get excluded or included in this category? What counts as "religious" and why? Who gets to decide? This course is an introduction to foundational theories of religion and to the history of the construction of the category of “religion” over time. Throughout the term, you will be working on formulating your own theory of religion, which you will articulate and defend in your final seminar paper. In this course, you will gain (as ritual theorist Catherine Bell says) “the skills and tools to make sure that very complicated situations and ideas can be put into words, thereby making it possible to have discussions about issues that can only be discussed if there is language for reflexivity, nuance, counter-evidence, and doubt.” In the process, you will be asked to make theory translatable to your peers by actively engaging theoretical concepts in creative and innovative ways.

REL 319-20 – Readings in Tibetan literature

(Fall 2024, Professor Sarah Jacoby)

This course explores a variety of Tibetan-language genres of writing such as history, poetry, philosophy, doctrine, narrative literature, and more, with attention to their form and content. All course readings are in Tibetan, presuming at least an intermediate ability to read Tibetan. Students will focus on Tibetan-English translation techniques while broadening their knowledge of Tibetan literary genres. Course readings will vary depending on enrolled students' specific areas of interest.

Graduate-level Courses Available to Undergraduates

REL 316-20 – Religion and the Body in China (RSG, RHM)

(Winter 2025, Professor Kevin Buckelew)
The fragility of the human body, its susceptibility to illness and death, provoked a wide array of responses among religious practitioners in pre-modern China. Some pursued supernatural longevity and even immortality through various regimes of self-cultivation. Others, by contrast, renounced the body in part or whole through dramatic acts of self-immolation. Even in death, however, many aspired to rebirth in heavenly realms where bodies do not grow old and die, but rather live forever in bliss. This course examines these various attempts to overcome death in Chinese religion—including Buddhism, Daoism, and traditions that fall between these large categories—seeking to understand how the mortality of the body was used to authorize particular modes of embodied living. In the process, we will explore how these modes of religious life shaped attitudes toward food, medicine, gender, sexuality, and family. *Counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) major concentrations.

REL 330-20 – Rabbinic Sex Stories (RLP, RSG)

(Winter 2025, Professor Shira Schwartz) 
Do rabbis have sex? Is Jewish knowledge erotic? And what is “the Talmud”? This course will explore these questions in relation to the original rabbis of late antiquity (3rd-7th centuries CE) through narratives, myths, and ethnographic accounts about rabbinic sex, gender and sexuality in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. You will learn to expand the definition of what constitutes “sex” or “desire,” “kinship” or “connection,” “body” or “text,” by examining ancient rabbinic forms of gendered, textual, and bodily transmission. Students will learn to become curious about bodily norms that are quite removed from the worlds that we inhabit no matter one’s starting point, and will learn to make connections across the ancient and contemporary. This is a deep-reading, discussion-based course that will provide students with an opportunity to learn how to read rabbinic texts in translation, to generate conversational learning through Jewish textual practices like question-and-response, and partnered study, also known as hevruta, and to deepen your knowledge of contemporary theory in gender/sex and sexuality. We will focus our attention continuously and deeply on a few key rabbinic texts, taking our time to plumb their many layers and the dynamic quality of rabbinic interpretive possibilities. No previous knowledge of Talmud or other Jewish texts required. *Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) major concentrations.

REL 339-21 – Talmud (RLP)

(Winter 2025, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer) 
The Talmud is one of the most important works of Jewish literature. For the last millennium, Talmud study has been a central part of Jewish religious and cultural practice. Despite the splintering of Judaism into different denominations, Jews the world over are unified by their commitment to studying Talmud. The Talmud is an unusual work of literature, and it has been credited as an influence on codes of law, sermons, modern works of Jewish literature, and even Seinfeld. This course will explain the Talmud’s import and durability within Jewish culture while introducing students to the rigors of legal analysis that lie at the heart of most talmudic passages. The course is ideal for those interested in religion, law, logic games and questions of textual interpretation. The course will study the Talmud entirely in English translation; there is neither a language prerequisite nor an expectation of prior experience reading the Talmud. *Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.

REL 339-22 – Jewish Texts

(Spring 2025, Professor Shira Schwartz) 

REL 339-23 – Ancient Jewish and Christian Narrative

(Spring 2025, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer) 

Courses Primarily for Graduate Students

REL 470-20 – Theology and the Study of Religion

(Spring 2025, Prof. Orsi and Prof. Helmer)

REL 471-20 / GNDR_ST 490-27 / HIST 405-28 – Embodiment/Materiality/Affect

(Fall 2024, Professor Michelle Molina)

REL 471-21 / ANTHRO 490-29 – Graduate Seminar: Religion & Capitalism

(Winter 2025, Professor James Bielo)
This course will engage historical and ethnographic sources that examine the diverse entanglements between religion and capitalism across cultural contexts. Our organizing question is this: how have religious expressions and capitalist systems mutually formed one another? We will consider cases such as Islamic banking; the commodification of religious materiality; theologies of financial prosperity in multiple traditions; ties between neoliberalism and religious change; and anti-capitalist movements grounded in religious frameworks. Students will conduct original research that explores a question they design in collaboration with the professor and course colleagues.

REL 471-22 – Graduate Seminar: Black Magic: Conjure and Healing Traditions in Black Atlantic Religions

(Winter 2025, Professor KB Dennis Meade)
In this course we will explore the cosmological, material, and spiritual technologies in Black Atlantic magico-religious traditions in the Caribbean and U.S. South. Our readings will help us interrogate the distinctions between practitioners self-understanding of supernatural technologies and the academic study of these traditions through the ethnographic and anthropological lens. Through theory, case studies, and primary sources we will trace the impact of antiblackness on the criminalization of these magical traditions from the colonial period to the present.

REL 473-20 – Graduate Seminar: Topics in Buddhism

(Winter 2025, Professor Sarah Jacoby)

REL 481-1-20 – Graduate Seminar: Classical Theories of Religion

(Spring 2025, Professor Brannon Ingram)

REL 482-20 / POLI_SCI 490-20 – Graduate Seminar: Religion & Politics: Global Perspectives

(Fall 2024, Professor Elizabeth Hurd)

This course offers students tools for thinking in a critical and comparative way about the intersections of religion, law, and politics from a global perspective. Much ink has been spilt considering and reconsidering definitions of religion, secularism, and politics, and how these concepts work to shape each other and the worlds we inhabit. This course asks, what comes next in the study of religion in politics? What does it look like to not only globalize this question by asking about a wider diversity of contexts and histories beyond Europe and its settler colonies but also to move beyond vocabularies that have framed and limited discussions of these questions for decades? This transdisciplinary seminar is an experiment in thinking the question of religion and politics in modernity anew. Themes to be considered through this prism include sovereignty, governance, coloniality, borders, Indigeneity, human movement, race, and law.

REL 482-21 – Graduate Seminar: Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion

(Spring 2025, Professor Shira Schwartz)