The IRCPL is pleased to announce and congratulate this year’s fellowship recipients. Each year, IRCPL awards funding to eight undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University to travel abroad or within the United States to conduct research on their dissertations and senior theses.

The IRCPL will start accepting applications for the 2013 fellowships beginning January 1, 2013.  View past fellowship recipients and guidelines for 2013 fellowship applications, due Friday, March, 2013, at 5pm.

2012 Graduate Fellows

• Talia Andrei, Department of Art History and Archaeology: Mapping Sacred Spaces: Representations of Pleasure and Worship in Shaji sankei mandara. 
• Michael Low, Department of History: Colonizing Mecca: The Hajj and Anglo-Ottoman Rivalry in the Hijaz, 1858-1916.
• Elizabeth Marcus, Department of French Romance and Philology: Communities, Continuity and Change: Lebanon and France, 1943-1958.
• Irene Sanpietro, Department of Classics: Fasting, Prayer, Alms: Christian Virtue Theory and the Transition from Apostolic to Institutional Church.
• Drew Thomases, Department of Religion: The King of Pilgrimage Places: Religion, Recreation, and Encounter in Pushkar.

2012 Undergraduate Fellows

• Jordan Alam, Department of English: Madness and Modernity: The Current Conception of Mental Illness and Mental Healthcare in Bangladesh.
• Nicholas Bloom, Department of History: Taking off the Mask:  James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, and the Consciousness of Revolution.
• Zachary Natan Cohen, Department of Sociology: The Global Hasid
   Food Stamps, Remittences, and the Satmar Diaspora.

The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, in partnership with Columbia University Press, is announcing the recent release of What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age, the newest title in the publication series Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age

Edited by Courtney Bender and Ann Taves
Published: May 2012

Over the past decade, religious, secular, and spiritual distinctions have broken down, forcing scholars to rethink secularity and its relationship to society. Since classifying a person, activity, or experience as religious or otherwise is an important act of valuation, one that defines the characteristics of a group and its relation to others, scholars are struggling to recast these concepts in our increasingly ambiguous, pluralistic world.

This collection considers religious and secular categories and what they mean to those who seek valuable, ethical lives. As they investigate how individuals and groups determine significance, set goals, and attribute meaning, contributors illustrate the ways in which religious, secular, and spiritual designations serve as markers of value. Reflecting on recent ethnographic and historical research, chapters explore contemporary psychical research and liberal American homeschooling; the work of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American psychologists and French archaeologists; the role of contemporary humanitarian and volunteer organizations based in Europe and India; and the prevalence of highly mediated and spiritualized publics, from international psy-trance festivals to Ghanaian national political contexts. Contributors particularly focus on the role of ambivalence, attachment, and disaffection in the formation of religious, secular, and spiritual identities, resetting research on secular society and contemporary religious life while illuminating what matters in the lives of ordinary individuals.

Edited by co-directors Mark C. Taylor and Alfred Stepan, the Religion, Culture, and Public Life series focuses on issues related to questions of difference, identity and practice within local, national and international contexts.  Special attention is paid to the ways in which religious traditions encourage conflict, violence and intolerance as well as support human rights, ecumenical values and facilitate mutual understanding.  By mediating alternative methodologies and different religious, social and cultural traditions, works published in the series open channels of communication that facilitate critical analysis.

IRCPL is pleased to announce this year’s fellowship recipients. Each year, IRCPL awards funding to eight graduate and undergraduate students at Columbia University to travel abroad or within the United States to conduct research on their dissertations and senior theses.

Talia Andrei, Department of Art History and Archaeology. Mapping Sacred Spaces: Representations of Pleasure and Worship in Shaji sankei mandara.
Michael Low, Department of History. Colonizing Mecca: The Hajj and Anglo-Ottoman Rivalry in the Hijaz, 1858-1916.
Elizabeth Marcus, Department of French Romance and Philology.
Irene Sanpietro, Department of Classics. Fasting, Prayer, Alms: Christian Virtue Theory and the Transition from Apostolic to Institutional Church.
Drew Thomases, Department of Religion. The King of Pilgrimage Places: Religion, Recreation, and Encounter in Pushkar.

Jordan Alam, Department of English. Madness and Modernity: The Current Conception of Mental Illness and Mental Healthcare in Bangladesh.
Nicholas Bloom, Department of History.Taking off the Mask:  James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, and the Consciousness of Revolution.
Zachary Natan Cohen, Department of Sociology. The Global Hasid
 Food Stamps, Remittences, and the Satmar Diaspora.

The IRCPL and the CDTR are happy to announce the continuation of the ongoing project Sacred Spaces – Religion and Conflict Resolution. Since 2009, Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology and History and Elazar Barkan, Professor of International and Public Affairs, have been fostering the examination of particular sacred sites, primarily in former Ottoman Empire areas, to look at historical as well as present-day issues surrounding shared sacred spaces. By delving into the past more carefully they show that we can document the legacy of shared sites and lived experience, thereby informing contemporary events.
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IRCPL is pleased to announce the 2011 fellowship recipients.  Five graduate and three undergraduate students at Columbia have been awarded grants to conduct research for their dissertations and theses this summer and fall. View past fellowship recipients and guidelines for 2012 fellowship applications due February 2012.

For more information, please visit our grants page.

With the sponsorship of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, Columbia Professors Josef Sorett and Obery Hendricks have started a new initiative to publicly document the religious life of Harlem. With the help of Columbia University students, the Religions of Harlem project uses written research, photos, and video to provide a unique view of the wide range of religious expressions, leaders, and communities that have been and continue to be central to the cultural worlds of Harlem. The locations students visit and capture are shared on the site’s blog and can also be viewed as a map.
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Ecologies and Economies. Organized by Jonathan Schorsch, Associate Professor of Religion.  In light of the worsening global environmental crisis, we will read a handful of works treating the intersection of natural philosophy, environmental sciences, economics, ethics and metaphysics.  Readings will address reconsideration of the progressivist, techno-capitalist project of modernism with an eye toward re-inclusion of what can aptly be called metaphysical realms: questions of desire, progress, satisfaction, “the good.”  Whether one labels these questions philosophical, political, bio-chemical or theological, it seems obvious that they must be conceptualized as a holistic path that seeks to understand and link the workings of the universe and the workings of the self.

Edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen

The first book in IRCPL’s publication series with Columbia University Press After Pluralism offers a critique on how religious difference is often framed as a problem only pluralism can solve. Its essays treat pluralism as concept historically and ideologically produced and explore it as a term that sets the norms of identity and the parameters of exchange, encounter and conflict. Contributors locate pluralism’s ideals in diverse sites—Broadway plays, Polish Holocaust memorials, Egyptian dream interpretations, German jails, and legal theories—and demonstrate its shaping of political and social interaction in surprising and powerful ways. To be published on October 15, 2010.

IRCPL is currently soliciting proposals for faculty seminars to be held in Fall 2011 or Spring 2012. These semester-long seminars bring together Columbia faculty and colleagues of peer institutions for investigations of interdisciplinary topics. Past seminars were on such topics as Networks, Toleration, Blood and Ghosts (to view past seminars and their participants, please visit: http://ircpl.org/seminars).

If you would like to organize a faculty seminar in the Fall 2011 or Spring 2012, please submit a proposal with a 1-2 page description of subject and a list of likely participants. It should also indicate anticipated results of the seminar, such as particular courses, a collection of essays, public lectures or symposia. Each seminar may have up to two organizers, who will each receive a stipend of $2000. Each seminar will also be provided with $2000 for expenses such as books, catering and materials.

Deadline for Fall 2011 Seminars: June 1st, 2011

Deadline for Spring 2012 Seminars: October 1st, 2011

Proposals due to Emily Brennan at eb422@columbia.edu