Past Faculty Seminars

Faculty Seminars bring together Columbia faculty and colleagues from different departments and disciplines for semester-long investigations of interdisciplinary topics. These are some past seminars sponsored by IRCPL.

Spring 2011 Seminars

• Ecologies and Economies. Organized by Jonathan Schorsch, Associate Professor of Religion. The worsening global environmental crisis has promoted much reconsideration of the progressivist, techno-capitalist project of modernism. The lessons of Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern are well taken: In excluding metaphysics, scientific rationalism has created a dangerous series of repressed entities. Current systemic catastrophes stem from what can aptly be called metaphysical realms: questions of desire, progress, satisfaction, co-existence, self-understanding, social organization.  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 macro and micro levels—that is, the secrets of the universe as well as of the self, which can only be seen as segregated one from the other at the price of world dissolution. Participants: Ann M. Burlein (Religion, Hofstra); Itai Sneh (Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia); Marian Ronan (New York Theological Seminary); and Alastair Kenneth Ager (Public Health, Columbia).

Spring 2010 Seminars

• Networks and Networking: Organized by Mark C. Taylor, Chair of Religion and Co-Director of IRCPL.  The seminar will explore the relationship of networks to social, political and cultural ideas and practices.  Consideration will be given to the role of networks in industrial, consumer and finance capitalism through an investigation of railroads, typewriters, telephones, television, Internet, the World Wide Web and cell phones. Participants: Josef Sorett (Religion, Columbia); Joshua Dubler (Religion, Columbia); Giovanna Borradori (Philosophy, Vassar); Itai Sneh (Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia); Lydia Liu (East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia); McKenzie Wark (Media Studies, New School); Michael Como (Religion, Columbia); Norris Chumley (Film, NYU); Rachel McDermott (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Barnard); Richard John (Journalism, Columbia); Robert Thurman (Religion, Columbia); Sophie Cabot Black (Writing, Columbia); Todd Gitlin (Journalism, Columbia); and Wayne Proudfoot (Religion, Columbia).

Spring 2009 Seminars

• Ghosts: Organized by Michael Como, Professor of Religion. This seminar will explore the role of ghosts both as an analytic category in academic discourse and as important, at times dominant, religious players within a variety of religious landscapes. In so doing, it will take advantage of the fact that ghosts have been the focus of theoretical discourse within a number of non-western religious traditions where ghosts have been key nodal points in political and religious in discourses concerning ancestors, kinship, ritual and land. Participants: Jonathan Schorsch (Religion, Columbia); Courtney Bender (Religion, Columbia); Gil Anidjar (Religion, MEALAC); Mark C. Taylor (Religion, Columbia); Bernard Faure (Religion, EALAC); Chun-fang Yu (Religion, EALAC, Columbia); Rachel McDermott (Asian amd Middle East Cultures, Barnard); Wendi Adamek (Religion, Barnard); Max Moerman (Asian amd Middle East Cultures, Barnard), Giovanna Borradori (Philosophy, Vassar) and Michael Como (Religion, Columbia).

• Secular Space/Religious Space: Organized by Reinhold Martin, Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. For a discipline almost literally built on the foundations of churches, temples, and other religious structures, architecture has had relatively little to say about the ambiguous borderline between secular and religious space in modernity. Instead, architectural discourse has generally relied on well-worn oppositions, such as enlightenment versus myth, or modernity versus tradition, to explain its historical impasses. It therefore offers a unique window onto the equivocations that may lie buried in these conventions. This is especially true for architectural modernism and for the centuries-long processes from which the modern city emerged and with it, the assumption that modernization and secularization go together. While the frame of reference will be spatial, this seminar will take up these questions in an interdisciplinary approach, inviting guests from various fields to present their work in architectural or urban studies. Co-sponsored by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Participants: Emily Apter (French, NYU); Jorge Otero Pailos (Architecture, Columbia); Peter van der Veer (Anthropology, Utrecht/Max Planck Institute); Michael Warner (English and American Studies, Yale); and Anthony Vidler (Architecture, Cooper Union).

Fall 2008 Seminar

• Fictocriticism: Organized by Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology. This seminar’s aim is to encourage alternative and experimental approaches to social science and history as is suggested by “creative nonfiction” or “fictocriticism.” The media involved would be writing, of course, but also poetry, song, music, film, visual arts, and theater-performance. Participants: Grahame Shane (Architecture, Cooper Union); John Pemberton (Anthropology, Columbia), John Szwed (Music, Columbia); Michael Golston (English and Comparative Literature, Columbia); Caterina Pizzigoni (History, Columbia); Carla Stang (Anthropology, U. of Sydney); and Brigitte Weingart (Germanic Languages, Bonn).

Spring 2008 Faculty Seminars

• Time and Modernity: Organized by Wayne Proudfoot and Jonathan Schorsch, Professors of Religion. For phenomena connected with religion, few things may be more central than time. The notion of sacred time; the eternality of god; the mystical attempt to transcend time; the end (of) time itself—these are just some of the ways this seminar looks at how time and religion ground one another. Yet few phenomena are directly studied and discussed as little as time. This seminar seeks to address some of these elusive themes in the hope of stimulating thought about one of the ways scholars construct religion and religion constructs its world. It will look at calendars, millenarianism, ritual, philosophy of history, and literature to try to illumine some of the relations between religions and time(s). Participants: Robert Somerville (Religion, Columbia); Rachel McDermott (Asian and Middle East Studies, Barnard); John McGuckin (Religion, Columbia and UTS); and Mary McGee (Dean of Students, Columbia).

• Blood: Organized by Courtney Bender, Associate Professor of Religion, and Gil Anidjar, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. The language of a “bygone culture” sometimes sounds off-key given the notable presence and mark of blood in common discourse, scholarly work, religious activity. Blood seals or rends diverse relations between varied social and fleshy bodies; blood consecrates, contaminates, circulates, and flows. It is categorically registered in modern conceptions of violence, trauma and purity. Whether construed as a thing of the past, that which makes ambiguous the boundary between the modern and the religious, or something else altogether, the blood this seminar will aim to read could be described as a “religious fact.” The seminar’s bibliography broadly engages anthropological, historical, scientific, social, political and theological dimensions of blood in order to understand both of these terms – religious, fact – when it comes to blood. Participating Faculty: Michael Como (Religion, Columbia); Elizabeth Castelli (Religion, Barnard); Chun-Fang Yu (Religion, Columbia); Wendy Adamek (Religion, Columbia); Sarah Cole (English, Columbia); Neni Panourgia (Harriman Institute, Columbia);  Mark C. Taylor (Religion, Columbia); Celia Deutsch (Religion, Barnard); and Michael Taussig (Anthropology, Columbia).