Lessons
teaching across the borders of American religion
While the study of religion historically focused on ideas and belief, the material turn has prompted scholars to question and challenge the primacy of belief in our studies. As a pedagogical style, object lessons began to develop in the nineteenth century. An object lesson centers a visual aid or physical artifact as the main point of discussion. Students would examine and investigate the object, answering questions about its form, shape, smell, weight, purpose, cultural significance, and more. For students, the object itself is the lesson, prompting more questions to be asked and riddles to be solved. Nothing could be memorized. Every insight invited additional reflection.
We invite object lessons on the study of American religion. What is an object that prompts reflection about the boundaries and assumptions of American religion? What does that object reveal about American religion and the study of it? How does the object provoke new scholarship? What can that object teach us?
INAUGURAL PROJECT: WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES AN “S” MAKE?
Over the last decade, several institutions that train graduate students to teach American religion have added an important letter. You know the one that I am talking about, the magical “S” meant to transform the area of study once called American religious history or American religion to “Religion in the Americas.” That letter carries lots of weight, hinting at the possible unsettling of United States exceptionalism, the expansion of our questions toward continental horizons, and the reimagination of the field as inherently transnational in scope. Thinking about what we do as transpiring “in the Americas” offers the potential for fronting new subjects, themes, periodizations, and geographies. Still, years into this modification, it remains unclear just what the “S” really means in terms of our expectations, attentions, and practices as teachers. As we prepare current students and future scholars for this reconceptualized field(s), what difference does that final letter make?
This series will ask several scholars involved in training graduate students in American religion, what the “S” means to them and how it operates in their contexts. How does the term “Americas” change their approach to graduate education? Has it prompted their departments to re-consider the purpose and scope of their program? Has it shifted the languages that they require? How many students are establishing expertise in indigenous and creole languages? Does the work of scholars who write in Spanish, French, and Portuguese make it onto their students’ exam lists?
Conversely, adding the “S” raises other questions about continuities and ruptures. What are our responsibilities to deliver any history of the field or survey of its inherited preoccupations if those have inevitably centered upon the United States? What difference would it make for a student working on Dominican festivals to know about the Second Great Awakening or another who studies Aymara Pentecostals to learn of North American anti-Catholicism? Does this breadth only work in a single direction, demanding that students working on points to the south master a version of American Religious history for the sake of getting those George Whitefield jokes at an annual conference?
While changes in our programs’ titles raise related questions about method (what does it mean to drop “History” or “Culture”? How does our teaching change when we switch from the adjective religious to the noun “religion/s”?), this series will focus first on geographies, asking how the disruption of “America” as a referent used almost exclusively for the United States actually changes the way we should shape the next generation of scholars. What are the considerations we must contemplate when we set out to train them in wider ways? Should we free ourselves of the persistent discussions so that we might clear the ground for new investigations or do we perform a disservice by failing to provide a space upon which younger scholars might set their feet, even as they launch out to new places? Especially in our current moment, how does teaching across American borders prepare our students for their meaningful lives of scholarship, teaching, and public engagement?
The series begins with my own meditation on teaching the Gateway Seminar “Approaches to the Study of Religion in the Americas” to graduate students from UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke over the last six years. I will share my current syllabus and open up about my attempt to grapple with these questions as well as areas where the course inevitably falls short. In coming months, colleagues from diverse institutions will join this conversation, sharing thoughts on how these changes play out in their seminars, language requirements, exam lists, professionalization, and research guidance. For now, I offer this altogether informal list of PhD programs and their concentration titles:
Yale: American Religious History
Florida State: American Religious History
Emory: American Religious Cultures
Duke: American Religion
Virginia: American Religions
Northwestern: American Religions
Pennsylvania: American Religions
Boston University: Religions in American Culture
Harvard: North American Religions
Columbia: North American Religions
Iowa: Religions of Europe and the Americas
UNC: Religion in the Americas
Indiana: Religion in the Americas
Princeton: Religion in the Americas
Texas: Religion in the Americas
Florida: Religion in the Americas
Arizona State: Religion in the Americas
Chicago: Religions in the Americas
UCSB: Religions of the Americas
CURATOR, 2021 - Present
Emily Suzanne Clark is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University where her research and teaching emphasize the intersections of religion, power, and social identity in America. Her first book, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), examined the politics of speaking with the dead. Her current book project investigates American Spiritualism and materiality. She also co-edited Race and New Religious Movements in the USA: A Documentary Reader (Bloomsbury Press, 2019).
CURATOR, 2019 - 2021
Brandon Bayne is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He specializes in religion in the Americas with particular attention to colonial encounters between missionaries and indigenous communities. His first book, Missions Begin with Blood: Suffering and Salvation in the Spanish Borderlands is forthcoming with Fordham University Press.
