Global Circuits

Religion, Race, Empire

This seminar explores how American entanglements of race and religion shape and are part of larger global processes. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate these entanglements through conceptual, historical, and ethnographic questions and insights on the remapping of religious traditions and communal experiences onto imperial terrain. We will examine this through a range of problem spaces including: colonial rule and racial hierarchies; religious difference and migration; the racialization of religion; diaspora and empire; persecution and power; and global geographies of the War on Terror. This course is not an exhaustive account of the enmeshment of race and religion in the United States or globally. Rather, this course aims to critically unpack formations of religion and race, and their contemporary mediation by American geopolitics.

Anthropology of Religion in the Middle East

This introductory course examines religion in the modern Middle East, from the seventeenth century to the present, through historical and anthropological analyses of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traditions. Rather than offering a survey, it is structured around key analytical questions: how the Middle East has been framed within Western imaginaries, how geopolitics has shaped religious practices, and how religion can be studied across diverse sites in the region. We begin with colonial encounters and Western discourses on Islam, then turn to modern conditions of piety in Egypt and Lebanon. To understand the ways geopolitical intervention and power have affected religious traditions and cultures, we will then focus on the topics of war and political Islam, exploring through novels and film how both have structured discourse and debate on and in the region. The final weeks of course attend to Christian cultures and Jewish memory in Iraq, Iran, and Morocco to texture prominent Western narratives on minority communities in the Middle East. Please keep in mind that this is not a survey course, but one that is guided by a set of analytical questions concerned with key concepts and images that frame our contemporary discussions of the Middle East in the academy and the popular press.

Settler/Secular Difference

This graduate seminar examines the entangled histories of secularism and settler colonialism across multiple geographies. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate how the secular construction of “religion”—as a legal, social, and political category—has enabled imperial domination, elimination, and the reorganization of Indigenous communities and their forms of life. Drawing on scholarship in American Studies, decolonial studies, and critical secularism studies (e.g., Sylvia Wynter, Tisa Wenger, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, An Yountae, Talal Asad, Hussein Agrama, Saba Mahmood), we will think across disciplines to examine intersections and missed encounters in the study of religion, race, and colonialism. Key themes in this course include the minority concept, religious difference, translation, indigeneity, and empire. We will ask: What does it mean to think about settler difference in a secular age? And what does it mean to think about secular difference in a settler age?