Winter 2026 Class Schedule: Department of Religious Studies

Winter 2026 Class Schedule

Course	Title	Instructor
REL 101-8-21	First-Year Writing Seminar: Islamophobia and Antisemitism	Ingram
REL 101-8-21 First-Year Writing Seminar: Islamophobia and Antisemitism (Winter 2026, Professor Brannon Ingram)
REL 101-8-22	First-Year Writing Seminar: Puppets, Robots, and other Uncanny Doubles	Buckelew
REL 101-8-22 First-Year Writing Seminar: Puppets, Robots, and other Uncanny Doubles (Winter 2026, Professor Kevin Buckelew)
REL 101-8-23	First-Year Writing Seminar	Orsi
REL 101-8-23 First-Year Writing Seminar (Winter 2026, Professor Robert Orsi)
REL 220-20	Introduction to Hebrew Bible	Wimpfheimer
REL 220-20 Introduction to Hebrew Bible (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.
REL 230-20	Introduction to Judaism: Jewish Texts	Schwartz
REL 230-20 Introduction to Judaism: Jewish Texts (Winter 2026, Professor Shira E. Schwartz) 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 264-20	American Religious History from 1865 to the Great Depression	Orsi
REL 264-20 American Religious History from 1865 to the Great Depression (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.
REL 319-20	Chan/Zen Buddhism	Buckelew
REL 319-20 Chan/Zen Buddhism (Winter 2026, Professor Kevin Buckelew) The Chinese Chan (Japanese Zen) Buddhist tradition is one of the most famous branches of Buddhism in the world, but also one of the most widely misunderstood. This course explores the history, literature, philosophy, visual culture, and monastic practices of Chan/Zen Buddhism in East Asia. We pay special attention to the ways Chan/Zen innovated within the Buddhist tradition to establish a uniquely East Asian school of Buddhism. Along the way we consider the changing place of meditation in Chan/Zen practice, closely read Chan/Zen sermons and kōans, analyze the role of women and gender in Chan and Zen, and conclude by considering the modern reception of Zen in the West.
REL 339-20	The Art of Rabbinic Narrative	Wimpfheimer
REL 339-20 The Art of Rabbinic Narrative (Winter 2026, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer) Rabbinic literature contains a large corpus of stories. In this course we will explore different methods of reading such stories. These range from naïve historiography to sophisticated historiography, from reading these stories as fables with didactic morals to reading them as windows onto a class-stratified and gender-divided rabbinic culture. Our analysis of these methods of reading rabbinic stories will be conducted in conversation with different twentieth century literary theorists.
REL 359-20	Islam and Colonialism	Ingram
REL 359-20 Islam and Colonialism (Winter 2026, Professor Brannon Ingram)
REL 369-20	What is Christian Nationalism (RLP)	Bielo
REL 369-20 What is Christian Nationalism (RLP) (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) major concentration.
REL 379-22	Exhibiting Religion	Bielo
REL 379-22 Exhibiting Religion (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.
REL 386-20	Sin, Salvation, Racialization	Molina
REL 386-20 Sin, Salvation, Racialization (Winter 2026, Professor Michelle Molina)
REL 395-20	Theories of Religion	Taylor
REL 395-20 Theories of Religion (Winter 2026, Professor Sarah Taylor) What counts or does not count as “religion”? How do we know? And who gets to decide? This course explores the major foundational theorists in the field of Religious Studies, while placing them into conversation with contemporary perspectives in the field. We begin by asking “What is a theory? And what does it mean to have a theory about something?” We then dig into those theories and engage with them -- “activating theory” by representing each theory we study in creative and participatory ways that actively involve the whole class. Throughout the quarter, you will be formulating your own theory of religion and then making the case for it in your final project. Have you taken theory courses in the past that are a bit dry and opaque? We take a different tack. Put on your creative and artistic thinking caps as we make theories of religion come alive in unique and innovative ways. This course involves music, art, video, podcasts, and other artistic mediums, in addition to written texts.
REL 468-20	Graduate Seminar: Textual Ethnography	Schwartz
REL 468-20 Graduate Seminar: Textual Ethnography (Winter 2026, Professor Shira E. Schwartz) This seminar explores theoretical and methodological links between textual and ethnographic research. As an interdisciplinary and topic-motivated field, religious studies pursues research questions that can cross multiple disciplines and periods. This seminar takes up one of those crossings—text and ethnography—as a site of rich potential for methodological innovation and theoretical exchange. Responding to recent calls to decenter “the human” within the (post)humanities and social sciences, we will investigate what gets lost by dividing meaning from materiality, the natural from the cultural, the archival and literary from the ethnographic. Troubling disciplinary boundaries and categorical binaries, students will be encouraged to explore what text and ethnography share as entangled sites of human and nonhuman production and what we stand to gain by linking them. What are the textual practices inscribed by our ethnographic fields and scholarly productions? How do we locate the sites in which textual projects emerge and include the bodies in which they come to live? Students will learn how to expand and deepen their own textual and ethnographic projects by incorporating research practices from both methods. Readings will be drawn from fields like anthropology, textual, literary and media studies, queer and trans studies, lived religion, science and technology studies, antiquity studies, history. The course will be of interest to students across these fields. Assignments will position students to integrate course readings and topics to their own research projects, to develop interdisciplinary research methods across time and modality, and to apply that knowledge toward research proposal development.
REL 471-22	Graduate Seminar: Nondualism	McClish
REL 471-22 Graduate Seminar: Nondualism (Winter 2026, Professor Mark McClish)