DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

(Fall 2025, Professor Elizabeth Shakman Hurd)

This research seminar is for advanced undergraduates interested in U.S. American borders. We read widely in politics, history, religious and cultural studies, anthropology, and border studies. We also watch documentary films, listen to music, and engage with guest speakers. Central themes include the history of US borders with Mexico, American exceptionalism, Indigenous communities, protest movements, law on and around borders, sanctuary and sovereignty, the history of the passport, religion and borders, and environmental politics in the borderlands. Border issues are considered from multiple perspectives, including but also going well beyond issues of surveillance and enforcement. Students will complete a research paper on a topic of their choice involving border studies.

(Fall 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.  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.

(Fall 2025, 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.

(Winter 2026, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)
There is no understating the significance of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in Western Culture. The Bible is a text that has been repeatedly turned to for spiritual guidance, for explanations of mankind's origins and as the basis of both classical art and contemporary cinema. English idiom is peppered with phrases that originate in the Hebrew Bible and many a modern political clash can be understood as a conflict over what the Bible's messages and their implications. This course introduces students to the Hebrew Bible by reading sections of most of the Bible's books. But reading is itself a complicated enterprise. The Bible has been put to many different uses; even within the world of academic scholarship, the Bible is sometimes a source of history, sometimes a religious manual, sometimes a primitive legal code and sometimes a work of classical literature. This course will introduce students to the various challenges that present themselves within the study of the Hebrew Bible and the varied approaches scholars take when reading the Hebrew Bible. This course is a critical introduction to the Hebrew Bible.

(Winter 2026, Professor Shira E. Schwartz)
This course serves as an Introduction to Judaism through an introduction to Jewish textual sources. The course will explore critical tenets of Jewish life and practice through a range of classical and contemporary Jewish textual genres, as well as Jewish textual artifacts, ritual objects, and forms of media, like Torah scrolls, Jewish type, and digital commentary. Students will learn how to engage Jewish texts through different Jewish reading practices and hermeneutics, including through partnered text-study (havruta). Our approach will also pay attention to the media and materiality of Jewish transmission across different kinds of Jewish sources. *The course counts towards the Media, Technology, Journalism and Religion (MTJR) major concentrations.

(Spring 2026, Professor Richard Kieckhefer)

(Fall 2025, 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.

(Winter, Professor Robert Orsi)
This course examines major developments, movements, controversies, and figures in American religious history from the end of the Civil War, as the nation struggled to make sense of the carnage of war and to apportion responsibility, to the 1930s, when economic crisis strained social bonds and intimate relations and challenged Americans to rethink the nature of public responsibility. Topics include urban religion; religion and changing technologies; African American religion; religion and politics; and the religious practices of immigrants and migrants. The course counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) major concentration.

(Spring 2026, Professor Robert Orsi)

(Winter 2026, Professor Sarah Jacoby)
In the middle of the twentieth century, cutting-edge literary theorists concluded that autobiography was exclusively a product of “Western” individualistic culture, thereby ignoring the literary output of large parts of the globe, including Buddhist religious literature. The goal of this course is to explore Buddhist biography and autobiography as literary genres and as lenses through which we can examine the various meanings of living an exemplary Buddhist life, focusing on religious literature from India and Tibet. Questions the course will probe include: How did a religious doctrine such as Buddhism, which denies the ultimate existence of the self, become a major locus of auto/biographical writing? What is the nature of the self as it is expressed in Buddhist religious auto/biography, and what were the aims of this literature? What can we learn from reading biographies and autobiographies about Buddhist selves, societies, and histories? How do differences of gender, nationality, and religious lineage inform auto/biographical representations of the self? 

(Fall 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.

(Winter 2026, Professor Brannon Ingram)
At the turn of the twentieth century, the vast majority of the world’s Muslims lived under the British Empire. British colonialism and imperialism had an incalculable impact on the modern history of Islam. This course explores that impact in the domains of religion, culture, law, literature, and politics from the founding of the East India Company in 1600 to the Partition of India in 1947. While centered on South Asia, the course will also consider ways that governance of Muslims in India became the model for governance of Muslims in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean. Topics will include (but are not limited to) changes in the status and nature of Islamic law; impacts of new forms of travel and mobility on Muslim ritual life, especially the Hajj pilgrimage; new debates about the status and position of women in Muslim societies; reimagining the biography of the Prophet Muhammad in light of Orientalist critiques of his prophetic career; the development of a quintessentially “Victorian” Islam in nineteenth century England; and reassessments of Muslim political thought in the context of nascent anticolonial movements in the early twentieth century.

(Fall 2025, Professor Usman Hamid)
This course examines the relationship between bodies and religion by examining Muslim embodiment of the Islam tradition in historical and contemporary contexts. Bodies are the site of much religious attention, both in terms of discourses and practices. As the instruments of ritual performance, they are subject to religious self-discipline and careful social regulation. At the same time bodies are medium through which religious experiences are made sensible and social identities materialized. As pivotal sites of religious expression and practice, bodies have been subject to a wide range of discourses, including aesthetic, devotional, ethical, erotic, legal, medieval, and political. The material reality of bodies has also drawn special attention from Muslim scholars and laity alike, with concerns ranging from health and healing, disability and difference, birth and childrearing, sex and gender, to death and dying. Finally, the bodies of Muslim holy figures have played an important role in the construction of urban environments, ritual practices, and sacred geography. Over the course of the quarter, we shall examine case studies that address some of these major themes and issues.

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

(Winter 2026, James Bielo)
In this course, students will explore the religious, social, and political dimensions of Christian nationalist movements. We will consider the U.S. case in historical and ethnographic perspective, and contextualize it amid global comparative examples. The course counts towards the Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration. 

(Fall 2025, 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. This course explores the power of the sacred human-horse bond as represented in art, film, TV, and social media, while teaching techniques and tools for analyzing media and making your own media! We will start by looking historically and anthropologically at the co-evolution of humans and equids, investigating how the domestication of horses and the mutually shaping human-horse relationship radically changed the world. We will also learn how religion followed the path of horses across the globe. In fact, the history of religions, their spread, comingling, and influence can be told through the prism of human-horse partnerships over space and time. We will learn about horses in mythology and sacred symbol, divine horses with supernatural powers, and how horses become a mainstay of folklore on virtually every continent. We will read and listen to reflections on the ways horses help some people to think about, know, and experience God/the divine, and/or find existential meaning. We will explore horse religions and worship (old and new), the key role played by horses in many funerary rites, and learn more about peoples who know themselves as “the people of the horse.” We will also learn about the use of horses in therapy programs for those mentally, emotionally, physically, and developmentally challenged, and the successful use of horse therapy to heal veterans and others coping with PTSD. Finally, we look at a variety of horse trainers and clinicians who approach horsemanship as a kind of sacred vocation, devotional path, and/or spiritual discipline. At the core of this course is investigating why and how it is that horses fascinate humans, capture so many hearts, and fuel our imaginations. In other words, “What is it about horses . . . ?” We learn about media by “doing media,” so this course offers the chance to design and produce two media projects based on original research and analysis, examining works that mediate horses. We will also have a class field trip to an equine therapy center. [No experience with horses necessary, though not recommended for students who are allergic to equines.]
*The course counts toward the Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and the Media, Technology, Journalism and Religion (MTJR) major concentrations.

(Winter 2026, 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.

(Fall 2025, Ely Orrego-Torres)
This course teaches how think critically, comparatively, and globally about the intersections of religion, law, and politics. A central focus is on how “religious freedom” and “secularism” are contested concepts, influenced by historical context and the circulation of ideas. We study these dynamics comparatively, examining the ways in which religious, legal, and political traditions around the world intersect, interact and co-constitute. Students will learn to critically evaluate competing perspectives and articulate informed positions on contemporary challenges in diverse societies and it also aims to equip students with the knowledge and analytical tools to engage thoughtfully in global debates on religion, politics, and human rights.

The course is organized around a set of theories and legal cases curated by Professor Elizabeth Hurd and Professor Winnifred Sullivan which are available through the open access Teaching Law and Religion Case Study Archive. The course traverses disciplinary, geographic, and secular-religious boundaries, drawing on readings from politics, socio-legal studies, religious studies, indigenous studies, anthropology, history, and popular culture. Students will consider their own experiences of living with religious diversity as we explore strategies to think religion anew in the contemporary world. Through readings, discussions, case studies, and collective projects, students will gain a nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics of religious freedom and secularism in world politics.

*The course counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) major concentration.

(Fall 2025, Professor James Bielo)
How is religious authority performed, negotiated, and challenged across cultural contexts and discourse genres? In this seminar, students will engage this question through a series of ethnographic works and their own original data analysis. We will explore the intersection of religious studies, the anthropology of religion, and linguistic anthropology through scholarship that examines diverse communicative practices and ideologies.