Study Abroad
“What happens when you go somewhere else?”
What does it mean to study American religion outside of “America”? Whether understood as nation, continent, or hemisphere, significant intellectual energy focuses on a sense of “America” as tethered to a particular geographical prospect.
In 2021 (online) and 2022 (in Berlin), American Religion convened a series of meetings that invited scholars to consider the prospect of what we called “American Religion Goes Abroad.” Given the location of our meeting in Berlin, we invited participants working in Europe and Africa whose work registers as both recognizably engaged with religion in/of/around America in some way, and yet also does so in manners, places, and among people that might not seem like ordinary subjects for this putatively anchored and restricted subfield.
Bringing together scholars working in Germany, Ghana, Ireland, Sweden, the US, and the UK, with research interests extending as well to Benin, France, Israel, and Pakistan, and representing a diversity of methods and perspectives, the meetings focused on a sense of studying abroad, asking “what happens when you go somewhere else?”
This series begins online Thursday, September 7, with new essays appearing on Tuesdays and Thursdays through September 21.
September 7: “Globalizing Alabama, Americanizing Judaism” by Alana Vincent
September 12: “Is Pentecostalism an American Religion?” by Sitna Quiroz
September 21: “Sexual and Gender Liberation in Pakistan: An Inside or Outside Issue?” by Amanullah De Sondy
September 26: “Religion, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Hair in Contemporary Ghana” by Genevieve Nrenzah
September 28: “An American Joan of Arc” by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan