Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life

Faculty Seminars

Faculty Seminars bring together Columbia faculty and colleagues from different departments and disciplines for semester-long investigations of interdisciplinary topics.

• To participate in a seminar, please contact Emily Brennan at eb422@columbia.edu.
• For directions on how to submit a seminar proposal, click here.

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.
  • Schedule for bi-weekly meetings will be determined in January 2010. If you are interested in participating in the seminar, please contact Emily Brennan at eb422@columbia.edu.

Multi-Year Faculty Research Groups

The Institute supports the following working groups that bring together faculty members to work on a multi-year interdisciplinary projects.

• Working Group on Toleration is developing volumes that will become cornerstones in the field on secularism and toleration, published by the Columbia University Press Series.
  • A volume by an interdisciplinary group comprised of Columbia faculty including Karen Barkey (Professor of Sociology), Akeel Bilgrami (Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities), Ira Katznelson (Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History), Sudipta Kaviraj (Professor of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures), Alfred C. Stepan (Wallace Sayre Professor of Government); Nadia Urbinati (Nell & Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the Core Curriculum).
  • A response to A Secular Age by Charles Taylor on the emergence of secularism within Latin Christendom. The volume asks to what degree is the book’s thesis relevant to non-Christian cultures with chapters on Sufi West Africa by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (French, Columbia), on Latin America by Claudio Lomnitz (Anthropology, Columbia), on the Ottoman Empire by Karen Barkey (Sociology, Columbia), on the Middle East by Timothy Mitchell (MEALAC, Columbia), on China by Peter Van der Veer (Utrecht University), on Indonesia by Alfred Stepan (Political Science, Columbia), on Japan by Ian Buruma (Bard College), and on South Asia  by Sudipta Kaviraj (MEALAC, Columbia), Akeel Bilgrami (Philosophy, Columbia), and Rajeev Bhargava (Center for the Study of Developing Societies).
  • An annotated reader of classic publications concerning debates on religion and  toleration based on the conferences “Six Hundred Years of Religious Conflict and Accommodation in India,” organized by Professor Sudipta Kaviraj.

• Joint Working Group with Institute for Research on Women and Gender: Chaired by Lila Abu-Lughod, William B. Ransford Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies. The Institute will help sponsor two international symposia on “Islamic Law and Women’s Human Rights: Can We ‘Take a Break’ from Postcolonialism?” and “Gender and the Politics of ‘Traditional’ Muslim Practices.” Participants:  Naz Modirzadeh (Harvard University); Arzoo Osanloo (University of Washington); Dina Siddiqi, conducts research on the politics of fatwas about women in Bangladesh; Brinkley Messick (Columbia University); Khaled Fahmy (Columbia University).

• Working Group on Sharing Sacred Sites: Chaired by Elazar Barkan, Professor of International and Public Affairs,  in relation to the conference (discussed below).

Click here to view past seminars.