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An upward view of Fowler Hall on the Occidental College campus

Something exciting is always happening in the Religious Studies department! Read on to find out what’s new this year.

This year we had another exciting year in the Department! We offered a variety of exciting courses that represented different religious and cultural communities across time and space, including The History of the Devil; Jews, Judaisms, and Jewish Identities; Religion and Climate Change; Religion and Horror; What is Shari’a? Justice, Law, and Ethics in Islam; Gendering Jews in Southwest Asia and North Africa; Islam and Capitalism; and Holy Sh*t! Engaging the Materiality of Religion.

Our graduating seniors completed amazing comprehensive projects based on their coursework and research at Occidental. Lucia Granja wrote about religion and colonialism in horror films, and Claire Kosek researched the modern development of Jihad.

We were delighted when our colleague Professor Kristi Upson-Saia, the David B. and Mary H. Gamble Professor of Religious Studies, was awarded the Graham L. Sterling Memorial Award, awarded to distinguished members of the Occidental faculty to acknowledge outstanding records. Professor Upson-Saia was nominated by her colleagues in recognition of her exceptional scholarship, her distinguished service at the College, and for inspiring her students with her amazing teaching. Professor Upson-Saia joined the Dean’s Office this year as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, and along the release of her latest book, Medicine, Health, and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean in 2023, this seemed like an ideal time to celebrate her stellar work that has enriched our department and the College.

Students in Religious Studies courses had the opportunity to learn from scholars carrying out cutting edge research across different fields. Some of our visitors this year  included Professor Jamel Velji (Claremont McKenna College) who discussed the connected histories of Islam and coffee; Professor Rebecca Bartel (San Diego State University) who talked to students about connections between microfinance and faith in Colombia; Professor Sarah Abrevaya Stein (University of California-Los Angeles) who discussed the Holocaust in North Africa; Professor Zaira J. Vidal-Cortes (University of California-Riverside) who discussed Brujeria in the modern history of the Americas; Professor Andrew Britt (University of North California School of Arts) to talk about his work on an augmented reality reconstruction of a historic Black church in central São Paulo; and Professor Pasang Yangjee Sherpa (University of British Columbia), the visiting Chan professor in Asian Studies, who shared her research on Sharwa worldviews and wellbeing in the era of climate change.

Students also learned about religion in practice in communities in LA. In both Fall and Spring, Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies Chelsie May collaborated with SoCal institutions including the Skirball Cultural Center, The Wende Museum, and The Center for the Study of Political Graphics to provide students with access to some of their amazing primary source archives related to Jewish communities and political movements, inspiring students in the development of innovative research. And in the fall as part of a new course on religion and utopia, Professor Michael Amoruso took first-year students to the Self-Realization Fellowship on Mt. Washington, where they learned about the organization, its history, and monastic life at the site. He also invited the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists to class, where they talked with students about their art and performance work related to California’s utopian and alternative religious movements. 

On campus, the Department also collaborated with different offices and areas. The team in Special Collections in the Library were wonderful hosts for several of our classes. In Professor May’s Jerusalem class in the Fall, students looked at nineteenth century stereoscopes of Jerusalem. In Professor Holmes-Tagchungdarpa’s Spring class Holy Sh”t!, students explored examples of material religion in our campus archives.

Professor Chelsie May coordinated our first ever Religious Studies book club. Students read Claire Stanford’s acclaimed novel Happy for You (2023), which explores issues of Jewish and Asian American identity. Professor May and students met several times during the semester and in their final meeting, with the author Claire Stanford to discuss the book. This was a wonderful way to bring together community on campus.

Students also wrote and created amazing and insightful work for their classes. In Professor Diaz's History of the Devil course in the Spring, every week students submitted "wicked art assignments" as a way of illuminating artistic interpretations of the devil. Given the option to create original artwork or photograph art around LA, students played an active role in portraying the devil as a manifestation of unique expression and subversion. Keeping with this mischievous spirit of play and intellect, each student created an original research zine project about  a particular social history of the devil that blended complex research with distinct visuals. 

In Professor J Selke’s course Religion and Horror  in the Fall, students ranked the films they studied as part of the course, which delved into the representation of religion in horror cinema since the 1970s. Here was the order of their final ranking, based on critical reviews they carried out in the course:

  • 1. Get Out (2017)
  • 2. Carrie (1976)
  • 3. The VVitch (2015)
  • 4. The Void (2016)
  • 5. The Conjuring (2013)
  • 6. Midsommar (2019)
  • 7. Annihilation (2018)
  • 8. Sinister (2012)
  • 9. The Vigil (2021)
  • 10. The Mist (2007)
  • 11. The Exorcist (1973)
  • 12. The Ritual (2017)

Which film haunts you the most? Let us know through our department Instagram, @stepintorels!

We want to send Professor Selke a huge congratulations - they have accepted a 2-year visiting assistant professor position in Christianity and Literature at Lafayette College in eastern Pennsylvania. Thank you for your amazing courses and work with students at Oxy, Professor Selke, and very good luck for your move!



 

RELS Professor Sohaib Khan

We are excited to share the excellent news that Professor Sohaib Khan will be joining us in the Fall semester of 2023 as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies, which will become a continuing Assistant Professor position in his second year. Professor Sohaib Khan is a scholar of comparative Islamic studies interested in connections between religion, secularism and economic life in Muslim societies. His research, teaching and public scholarship lie at the intersection of Islamic studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and area studies of South Asia and the Middle East. Trained as an interdisciplinary historian and ethnographer, Professor Khan received his Ph.D. (2020) from Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) and the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and is joining us from Pomona College. Welcome Professor Khan!

This has been an exhilarating year in the Department of Religious Studies, as we have worked to present courses and opportunities to students that reflect the rich complexity and vital challenges faced by global communities: health, economic, and social inequalities; climate change; and an ever-changing dynamic world.

Our department’s own Prof. Upson-Saia has co-led an initiative on campus, Humanities for Just Communities (or HJC), to demonstrate the power of the Humanities to advance social justice. The HJC curriculum includes a virtual summer course for incoming frosh, a set of courses during the academic year, and teams of research students over the summer. You can read more about the work of the first cohort in 2022-2023--which was focused on the theme of health justice--in the Oxy news article linked here. Next year’s theme will be on displaced and migrating peoples.

As part of the HJC initiative, in Fall 2022 Prof. Upson-Saia team-taught a course with Philosopher Prof. Morrisey called “Envisioning and Enacting Health Justice.” In the course, students considered various conceptualizations of what “health justice” looks like, and then applied these concepts to three case studies on the patient-provider relationships, reproductive health, and end-of-life care. At the end of the semester, students put what they learned to work in one of five community-based projects with Oxy’s Office for Disability Services, Oxy’s Office of Pre-Health, and Planned Parenthood of Pasadena/San Gabriel Valley. 

RELS 120 course presentation

Another RELS course connected to the HJC was Prof. Holmes-Tagchungdarpa’s course, "Flourishing in a World on Fire: Cosmologies of Multispecies Health in the Anthropocene". This course focused on how Indigenous and local communities in the Pacific-Asia region conceptualize and respond to the challenges brought by climate change. The course centered cosmological visions of relatedness across human and more-than-human scales. At the end, students created multimedia projects that allowed them to reflect on and share what they had learned from the course. 

RELS Omar pictures

Beyond our HJC classes, other classes and events in the RELS department center the themes of justice, wellbeing, and centering voices that have been historically marginalized. In Fall 2022, Prof. Mixon developed an exciting series of events in her Islamic Studies courses around the critically-lauded opera Omar. This opera made its West Coast debut in L.A. over several weeks in late 2022, and portrayed the remarkable story of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim scholar stolen from Senegal and brought to America in 1807. He wrote his autobiography in Arabic in 1831, and the opera presents his experience in an entirely new medium. Prof. Mixon also hosted a series of lectures featuring leading scholars on related themes and new research regarding Omar ibn Said to allow students to gain important context and depth regarding the figure and the performance.

RELS 120 course

We were also excited to offer classes on other vitally relevant topics and conceptions of justice and wellbeing. These included courses taught by visiting faculty. Prof. Kim Diaz, who is working on a PhD at the University of California Riverside, offered “Religion, Liberation, and Latin American Social Movements” in the Fall. During the semester, students developed research projects and had the opportunity to learn more by engaging with LA. During October, students visited Olvera Street during the week of Dia de los Muertos and respectfully observed real-life examples of religion and liberation centered around death (photos provided by students). On the last day of class, RELS/LLAS 228 students presented their original research projects with visual aids. We also celebrated the end of the semester with burritos from a local favorite, Delia's. 

Prof. Kirsten Boles, a PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University, offered the exciting new course on gender and sexuality across religions and time, “Queering Religion.” This course was connected to her own research on Islam and gender in the U.S., and also engaged with a variety of case studies including Judeo-Christian reinterpretations of Genesis to make room for same-sex marriage; gender role mixing in Tantric Hindu ritual; and, Native American postcolonial approaches to HIV within the “two-spirit” community. 

We were also delighted to welcome Prof. Ilan Benattar to offer courses on modern Judaism. His courses, “Judaism: From the Middle Ages to Modernity” and “The History of Antisemitism,” provided modern, global perspectives about Jewish histories and cultures. Professor Benattar is about to complete his PhD at NYU on Ottoman Jewish intellectual history.

RELS speakers 22-23

We also hosted a number of amazing scholars to the department for talks related to their latest research, including Professor Elizabeth Perez (UCSB) who discussed “guts” in Afro-Diasporic and Latin American religions; Prof. Ka-ming Wu (Chinese University of Hong Kong), who presented research from her fieldwork on spirit possession in modern socialist China as a continuing site of community; and Sue D. Porter, Founding Executive Director of End of Life Choices Oregon who spoke to our students about her work with terminally ill people availing themselves of Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act.

Professor Candace Mixon

Finally, this year we bid farewell and offer our huge thanks to our brilliant colleague, Prof. Candace Mixon, who has taught amazing courses on Islam, material culture, art, and gender for the past three years. Prof. Mixon is moving to Portland to take up a position at Reed College. Congratulations Prof. Mixon! Prof. Mixon has worked tirelessly to provide students with amazing learning opportunities – from her initiative to develop her Introduction to Islam course around Omar and to take students to see the opera, as discussed above;

Professor Mixon class

through to amazing field trips to the Getty, LACMA, and many other important sites in LA which allowed students unparalleled opportunities for engagement with religious material culture and art; through to her innovative class activities, pictured here, inspired by her dynamic research on Islamic material culture and gender. Prof. Mixon, and her wonderful dog Jelly, have been deeply valued members of the department during a period of unprecedented challenges brought by the pandemic, and we wish them all the best! 

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