Sessions at the 9th Biennial Conference

The 9th Biennial Conference will include eight sessions on various topics related to religion and American culture. Each panel consists of scholars from a variety of fields, institutions, and subject areas, framing the conversation before turning it over for an interdisciplinary, full-room discussion on the topic at hand.

Details on sessions will be added as they are finalized.

Institutional Challenges

Higher Education is among the social institutions that have seen the most challenges over the past decade. From lost enrollment to the demographic cliff, from cut state appropriations to canceled research grants, colleges and universities are facing unknown futures. What concerns are on the horizon? How do academic leaders confront challenges in ways that incorporate or help faculty? How do leaders who have backgrounds and research expertise in the humanities and liberal arts make a claim for their continued prioritization in this political and cultural climate?

Panelists:

• Kathryn McClymond, President of Oglethorpe University
• John McGreevy, Provost of University of Notre Dame
• Jonathan L. Walton, President of Princeton Theological Seminary

Innovation

Recent scholarship on religion in American culture has moved beyond familiar narratives, sources, and scales of analysis, opening new ways of seeing how religion operates in everyday life, political imagination, material worlds, and systems of power. This panel invites conversation around emerging and innovative approaches by asking: What happens when scholars shift attention from belief and institutions to practice, embodiment, mobility/movement, affect, and material culture? How are digital tools, spatial analysis, sound, visual media, and data-driven methods reshaping the study of religious life and authority? In what ways are scholars rethinking archives—reading against the grain, using nontraditional sources, or foregrounding absence, silence, and loss? How do interdisciplinary methods from anthropology, Black studies, literary studies, sociology, media studies, and critical race and gender studies challenge inherited categories like “religion,” “secular,” and “culture”? And how might these new approaches not only change what we know about religion in America, but also how we understand power, inequality, and belonging more broadly?

Adaptation

With fewer academic jobs, more students who know little about religion, and departments being merged or shuttered, how should we as a field think about our role in academia today and going forward? How will research on religion in America be done and by whom? What will be the role of religion classes in a narrower curriculum? How do we teach outside the shrinking classroom? Rather than simply decry our losses, what are the paths forward, and what needs to be done to make them sustainable? This panel will look at exciting interpretations of religious studies both in and outside the traditional classroom to think through the future of a field that’s relevance is increasing while opportunity for scholarship largely is not.

Conspirituality

Public Authority

Revolution

Resistance

Academic Freedom