2025-2026 Course Descriptions
Courses primarily for:
Courses Primarily for Undergraduate Students
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
(Winter 2026, Professor Kevin Buckelew)REL 101-8-23 – First-Year Writing Seminar
(Winter 2026, Professor Robert Orsi)REL 170-20 – Introduction to the Study of Religion
(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.
REL 210-20 – Introduction to Buddhism
(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.
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
(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 250-20 – Introduction to Islam
(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.
REL 261-20 – Environmental Consciousness
(Fall 2025, Professor Mark McClish)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 265-20 – American Religious History from WWII to Present (RLP)
(Spring 2026, Professor Robert Orsi)
REL 270-20 – Introduction to Theology
(Spring 2026, Professor Christine Helmer)Theology is an academic discipline that, like philosophy, has to do with the big questions of life: What does God have to do with the world? How does body relate to soul? Why is evil so pernicious? What is special about theological thinking? We address the question “what is theology?” by asking theologians how they think, what topics fascinate them, and how they bring their experiences to their work. We discuss Christian theologians from the past, who have impressed their ideas on both the development of theology and culture in the west. We look to contemporary theologians to explain why some forms of theology perpetuate exclusions and how theology can be a tool for thinking about inclusive practices in church and world.
REL 309-20 – Enlightenment: Theories and Practices of Self-Realization in Indic Tradition
(Spring 2026, Professor Mark McClish)REL 345-20 – Idea of Sainthood in Christianity: The Ambiguity of the Undead: Saints in Byzantium and Russia
(Spring 2026, Professor Sergey Ivanov))REL 359-20 – Islam and Colonialism
(Winter 2026, Professor Brannon Ingram)
REL 369-20 – What is Christian Nationalism
(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.
REL 371-20 – Religion, Film, TV: The Spirit of Horses (RHM)
(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. 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 379-21 – The American Border: Politics, History, Religion (RLP)
(Fall 2025, Professor Elizabeth Shakman Hurd)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
(Winter 2026, Professor Michelle Molina)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.
Graduate-level Courses Available to Undergraduates
REL 315-20 – Buddhist Auto/Biography
(Spring 2025, 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?
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 319-20 – Chan/Zen Buddhism
(Fall 2025, 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
(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 339-21 – Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism
(Spring 2026, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)REL 339-22 – Kabbalah
(Spring 2026, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)Courses Primarily for Graduate Students
REL 486-20 – 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.