From June 3 to 24, Aun Hasan Ali was a Short-term Visitor at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. The visitorship was part of the School of Historical Studies' Shii Studies Research Program. During his stay, Dr. Ali studied Istiqsa al-i’tibar fi sharh al-istibsar with Dr. Hassan Ansari, one of the foremost authorities on Shiism in North America. This work, which is a commentary on one of the four major collections of Shii hadith, was written by the 17th century scholar Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Shahid al-Thani. In it, the author discusses a wide range of issues including epistemology, hermeneutics, history, rationalism, and law. A detailed analysis of the issues discussed in this work will be presented in a forthcoming book, co-authored by Dr. Ansari and Dr. Ali, on the use of hadith in Shii law.
Natalie Avalos has several forthcoming publications this fall. A journal article titled “We’re Not all Immigrants:” The White Liberal Nostalgia of Immigrant Life,” for the Sociological Imagination Journal, a joint chapter titled “Red Praxis: Lessons from Mashantucket to Standing Rock,” for the edited volume #NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi: Reflections on Standing Rock, and a short article on pedagogy titled “Decolonial Approaches to the Study of Religion: Teaching Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions” in the American Academy of Religion’s Religious Studies News Spotlight on Teaching series, focused on Teaching Religions as Anti Racism Education. She submitted an essay titled “Latinx Indigeneities and Christianity” for the Oxford Handbook of Latinx Christianities in the United States over the summer and will be working on her manuscript titled The Metaphysics of Decoloniality: Transnational Indigenous Religious Regeneration and Resistance during the 2018-19 year.
Loriliai Biernacki is giving a keynote address for a conference on Religion and Science at the University of Saskatoon, Canada. The title of her talk is Feeling the Self: the Ghost in the Machine, addressing underlying conceptions of selfhood in the face of our unprecedented technological shifts.
In the Spring of 2018, Sam Boyd had two articles accepted for publication. The first, “Exodus 21:35 and the Composition and Date of the Covenant Code,” utilizes two new methodological approaches in biblical studies (contact linguistics and memory studies) to analyze critical features of the law code in Exodus (traditionally believed to be the earliest legal collection in the Bible). The second, “Sargon’s Dur-Sharrukin Cylinder Inscription and Language Ideology: A Reconsideration and Connection to Gen 11:1-9,” contains two sections: a reanalysis of an influential passage from an Akkadian inscription and the importance for this reanalysis for understanding the Tower of Babel, which, I argue, is not a story about languages. The first article will appear in Die Welt des Orients. The second article will appear in the Journal for Near Eastern Studies. Additionally, Sam co-organized a conference held at Denver University, University of Colorado Boulder, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science pertaining to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the museum. The conference drew over 300 people in attendance at all of the sessions combined.
This summer Brian Catlos was a scholar in residence at the Institut Mila i Fontanals in Barcelona (CSIC - Spain’s National Research Council). He was featured at the Bradford Literary Festival in July in a panel on “Islam in Spain, the Rise and Fall of al-Andalus”; in September he will be interviewed at the Jaipur Literary Festival Boulder. His recent book, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (Basic Books: 2018) received a starred review in Library Journal, and was featured in the July 16 issue of The New Yorker (a review in the New York Review of Books this fall) In the coming year it will be translated into German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Complex Chinese. This fall he will be a speaker for Smithsonian in Spain and Portugal, will present at two conferences (Iberia, The Mediterranean, and the World in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA; and La Reconquista. Ideología y justificación de la guerra santa peninsular in Palmela, Portugal), and is co-organizing his 28th Mediterranean Seminar Workshop, to be held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in October. In November he will speaking at the University of Toronto. His next book, Paradoxes of Plurality: Ethno-religious Diversity in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean (working title) is expected in late 2019. In Summer he completed an entry for the Encyclopedia of Islam 3, the Routledge Companion to Medieval Iberia, both on “Mudéjares.” Forthcoming book chapters include: “The Abenferres: “Little Caesars” of Fourteenth-Century Mudéjar Lleida,” “Beyond Nostalgia: Berber “Puritans” and the End of Andalusi Convivencia?” and “Thomas F. Glick and Convivencia… A Few Words.”
Holly Gayley used her sabbatical last year to finalize translations for a new book, Inseparable Across Lifetimes: The Lives and Letters of the Tibetan Visionaries Namtrul Rinpoche and Khandro Tāre Lhamo (Snow Lion Press, forthcoming). Her article "Revisiting the Secret Consort (gsang yum) in Tibetan Buddhism" came out in the journal Religions 9 (6) in June, and her chapter, "Gendered Hagiography in Tibet: Comparing Clerical Representations of the Female Visionary, Khandro Tāre Lhamo" is scheduled for release this fall in the anthology, Buddhist Feminisms and Femininities, edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo (SUNY Press). Over the winter in Nepal and Bhutan, she began two new projects: (1) translating and analyzing songs of meditation advice by the Dudjom Lingpa (1835-1904) to Buddhist nuns and yoginīs and (2) a collaborative project on contemporary Bhutanse women writers with Sonam Nyenda, alumnus of our MA program in Religious Studies. This fall she is organizing a Lotsawa Translation Workshop at CU Boulder with Dominique Townsend of Bard College. Scheduled for October 5-8, 2018, the workshop will gather 50 scholars, translators, and graduate students to discuss translation theory and practice and workshop translations-in-progress around the topic of Buddhist devotion.
Sam Gill will be retiring after the Fall 2018 Semester. Dr. Gill has been a member of the Religious Studies faculty for more than 35 years. Although retiring from teaching, his contributions to the field will continue as he has two books appearing this fall entitled Religion and Technology into the Future: From Adam to Tomorrow's Eve and Creative Encounters, Appreciating Difference: Perspectives and Strategies.
Greg Johnson continues as the Interim Director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies. In this capacity, he was delighted to present aspects of his current work at the Native American and Indigenous Association meeting in May. Over the summer he was in Hawai`i running two workshops, one with Carla Fredericks of the Law school and the other with an international team focused on indigenous religions based in Norway. While in Hawai`i, Johnson also continued his research on sacred land and burial protection issues on Hawai`i island and Maui. Summer writing projects focused on these issues and on bringing several other works to conclusion, including a forthcoming edited volume with Hugh Urban, Irreverence and the Sacred: Critical Studies in the History of religions. Summer activities also included ongoing involvement with the Yale University material culture research group and Northwestern University's politics of religious freedom project. In the fall Johnson will teach Native American religious traditions and will travel to Switzerland to give several lectures.
Terry Kleeman traveled around France for he first part of the summer, visiting various museums, sacred sites, and roman ruins. On June 8 he formally received his medal at the Institut du France, the Médaille Stanislas Julien. He also participated in a reading session on early Daoist texts at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In August Dr. Kleeman will go to Beijing for the Beijing University Humanistic Forum, after which he will visit Laozi’s birthplace and other legendary and historic sites in central China. In October Dr. Kleeman will go to Temple University to evaluate their program in Religious Studies.
Elias Sacks recently published an article on poetry, music, and religious tolerance in a volume on gender, Judaism, and aesthetics in the Enlightenment entitled Sara Levy’s World: Bach, Gender, and Judaism in Enlightenment Berlin (Eastman Studies in Music, Rochester University Press). Sacks also spoke at a conference in Portland and at Princeton University and Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and completed his term as the President of the Rocky Mountain – Great Plains region of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical literature. His forthcoming publications include an essay on the future of Jewish philosophy and translations of Jewish responses to the seventeenth-century heretic Baruch Spinoza.
David Shneer, chair of the department, will be teaching a new first year seminar called Fighting Fascism, Past and Present and presenting Art is My Weapon: The Radical Musical Life of Lin Jaldati at York University in Great Britain in September and the College of Charleston in November. His upcoming book, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph and under contract with Oxford University Press, examines the life history of one of the earliest Holocaust liberation photographs taken in southern Russia in January 1942. For more information, see www.davidshneer.com.