Global Religions
Virtual Roundtable
Sponsored by NAVSA’s Religion and Spiritualities Caucus
June 1, 2024
8am PDT
11am EDT
4pm GMT
This roundtable, sponsored by the Religion and Spiritualities Caucus, brings together scholars of literature, history, and religion to discuss the affordances of “global religion” as an area of study. How, we wondered, might better attending to religion represent a way for Victorianists to undiscipline themselves? Does religion, for instance, destabilize colonialist categories such nation, civilization, and language? Or does the very category of religion – along with attendant binaries such as public vs. private or reason vs. superstition – itself represent a legacy of colonialism?
Our thinking has been motivated by critics such as Talal Asad and Tomoko Masuzawa, who argue that Western colonialism constructed the distinctions between secular and religious, public and private, reason and unreason. These critics have shown how such categories were developed in part to govern colonial societies, but also how they imported Protestant notions such as the privileging of inward conviction over embodied ritual. We wonder what such claims mean for scholars of nineteenth-century literature as they seek to think beyond the field’s received parameters.
Participants will precirculate short position papers, available via COVE Conferences. The responses collected here expand on these ideas, considering what “global religion” means in the context of each participant’s work and why it might be worthwhile to think about religion “globally.”
Registration is required for attendance.
Speakers
Sebastian LeCourt, U of Houston
Co-Chair
Winter Jade Werner, Wheaton College
Co-Chair
Peter Coviello, U of Illinois, Chicago
J. Barton Scott, U of Toronto
Mishka Sinha, Historic Royal Palaces, U of Oxford
Zhange Ni, Virginia Tech
Seth Koven, Rutgers U
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