In addition to teaching, RELS faculty are renowned researchers! Here's an overview of their recent scholarly accomplishments:
The biggest news of the year is that Professor Amoruso received tenure and promotion to the rank of Associate Professor - congratulations! Next year he will be on sabbatical, carrying out fieldwork in São Paulo as part of ongoing research into religion and contemporary urbanism in Brazil. Also this year he published an article “The Ghosts of Liberty: Notes on the Specters of São Paulo” in Anthropology of Consciousness 37(1). He will be presenting a related talk on this at the Brazilian Studies Association Conference in Salvador, Bahia in July. He also gave a flash talk on his first book, Moved by the Dead, at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
Prof. Khan published his article “Sharī’a Incorporated: Figuration, Performativity, and Religious Contestations over Corporate Power” in the flagship journal of Religious Studies, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Departing from Eurocentric genealogies of corporate personhood, Prof. Khan interrogates the religious personality of the corporation through a case study of Islamic banking in Pakistan. In doing so, he advocates for an approach to studying religion and capitalism in the Global South that centers local struggles with corporate power, while remaining attuned to structural inequalities steering those struggles in capital’s favor.
As part of her ongoing research on material culture in Tibet and the Himalayas, Prof. Holmes-Tagchungdarpa co-wrote an article with collaborators from Nepal, India, and Canada called “Khatak are not waste: Reclaiming khatak from over-consumption to care for each other and the earth,” that was published on the internationally-read website Buddhistdoor Global. Khatak, offering scarves that are used throughout Inner Asia, are now widely made from synthetic fabrics. The article contributes to discussions in the region about returning to traditionally made khatak that use biodegradable cotton materials as an expression of care for the environment.