Graduate Committee for the Study of Religion at UT-Austin

Please join the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin for the next lecture in the "Religion in Public" series. Professor Jennifer Graber will talk about changing religious practices among Kiowa Indians as European Americans seized control of Indian Territory. The event will take place Wednesday, November 7 from 6-7:30 pm at the Blanton Café. Food will be available for purchase at 5:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public.

Please join the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin for the first lecture of the "Religion in Public" series. Professors Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau will talk about an exciting discovery they made at Oxford University: an ancient Christian manuscript claiming to be Jesus' secret teaching to his brother James.

The call for papers for the GCSR conference is now out!

CALL FOR PAPERS

Building Bad: The Construction of “Evil” in Religious Discourse

Austin, Texas

April 10-12, 2015

Graduate Conference at The University of Texas

Submission Deadline: 1/5/2015

Keynote Speakers

Jo Ann Hackett, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Religious Studies, The University of Texas at Austin.

Arlene M. Sánchez-Walsh, Associate Professor of Church History and Latino/a Church Studies, Azusa Pacific University.

Peter Machinist, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages, Harvard University.

All stories have their villains. To many storytellers throughout history, other peoples and cultures were irredeemably “evil,” “chaotic,” or “lawless.” Religious discourse has been consistently rife with these assertions about the enemy, often using the evil of the “bad guy” to demonstrate the characteristics of goodness. In this way, villains reveal as much about their denouncers as they do about the demons themselves.

Representations of evil have become a topic of interest in recent years as scholars come to understand the cultural polemics that underlie them. This conference seeks to explore the ways that different cultures have represented their antagonists—in “history,” “fiction,” or other discursive forms—and the dual function these representations serve to construct identities in conflict.

This conference is organized jointly by graduate students in Religious Studies and the Hebrew Bible/Ancient Near East program, and therefore papers navigating these two disciplines are especially encouraged. Topics of interest to consider include, but are not limited to: gender, apostasy, identity formation, boundary creation and maintenance, visual representation, space, material culture, the body, and narrative approaches.

Send submissions and inquiries to [email protected] by 1/5/2015.

Please include in your proposal the paper title, presenter’s name, email address, and institution. Please submit a 300-word proposal explaining the topic, main argument, and methodology of the project. Paper presentations should not exceed 20 minutes in delivery.

We are having our Professionalization Colloquium tomorrow in BUR 436a at 11 am.
Jen Graber will come talk about gender and teaching; important topics when navigating a classroom.

We have the last meeting of the semester today from 12pm-1pm in Burdine 436a! We'll be ratifying our new board.

Thanks to all our presenters and attendees at the Remixing Religion conference this weekend!

The GCSR will be holding its first meeting of the Spring semester on Wednesday, February 12th at 12:00pm in Burdine 436a. If you would like to add anything to the agenda, please email the secretary Justin Doran.

The GCSR had its penultimate meeting of the year today. We modified the bylaws and announced our final meeting of the year which will be in exactly two weeks. If you wish to be nominated for any of the officer positions, please notify the Secretary, Justin Michael Doran. We will also be having a happy hour at the end of the semester.

We will be having a general meeting next Thursday, 4/18 at 12:00pm. We will be meeting in Burdine 436B, not the usual conference room. It is the conference room next to our normal conference room. We will be discussing the success of our Beyond Binaries conference, clarifying the bylaws, and setting up elections for the GCSR board next year.