UCSB Religious Studies

Join Us for a Landmark Symposium in South Asian Studies

This June, scholars from across the United States will gather at UCSB for “Critical Re-visionings in the Light of South Asia: In Celebration of Barbara Holdrege” — a two-day symposium honoring the extraordinary career and intellectual legacy of Professor Barbara Holdrege on the eve of her retirement.

When: June 6–7, 2026
Where: McCune Conference Room, UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center

Over six dynamic sessions, former and current students will explore and rethink some of the most important categories in the study of religion and the humanities:

🔹 Comparison
🔹 The Body
🔹 Gender
🔹 Space
🔹 Bhakti
🔹 Animals

The symposium also celebrates the enduring influence of Ninian Smart and the central role of South Asian studies in shaping critical and comparative approaches to religion.

Join us for two days of stimulating conversations, new perspectives, and a celebration of scholarship, mentorship, and intellectual community.

Zerkxis Bhandara, PhD student at the Legacies of Performance conference reading his paper “Embodied Legacy: Zoroastrian Priestly Practice and the Worldmaking Labor of Diaspora”

The department is pleased to announce that Dr. Elizabeth Pérez received the River Heron Editors' Prize for her poem "Independence Night." Dr. Pérez based this poem on the true story of her father's flight from Cuba and dedicated it here to immigrants and those advocating for them. Read the poem and her full artist's statement here:

River Heron Editors' Prize 2025 — River Heron Review ©Copyright 2018 - 2022, River Heron Review. All Rights Reserved.            Bucks County, PA             [email protected]

This talk will discuss how organizations and individuals have relied on religious freedom protections to assist immigrants. The landscape around legal protections for religious exercise has changed significantly since the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s. This talk examines recent and ongoing litigation at the intersection of religious freedom, humanitarian assistance, immigration raids, and protests.

Thomas Scott-Railton is an attorney at Gupta Wessler LLP and was previously a fellow with the Impact Litigation Practice of The Bronx Defenders. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, then-Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson, and Judge Alison Nathan.

This event is presented by the UCSB Legal Humanities Initiative, co-sponsored by the Legal Humanities Research Focus Group and Walter H. Capps Center, and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Professor Fabio Rambelli shares this memorial statement for Professor Emeritus, Alan Grapard who passed December 8 at his home in Hawaii --

Professor Allan Grapard – In Memoriam

Allan Grapard, professor emeritus of Japanese religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the inaugural holder of the International Shinto Foundation Chair in Shinto Studies, passed away on December 8 in his beloved Hawai‘i. He was among the most influential scholars of Japanese religious history over the last half century.

Born in Normandy in 1944, after his studies at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) in Paris, where he received his Ph.D., he spent many years doing research in Japan, before coming to the United States. Here he held appointments at the University of Colorado Boulder, at Cornell University, and at the East-West Center at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa before joining UC Santa Barbara in 1985.

Grapard was one of the leading promoters in the West of new approaches to Japanese religions and intellectual history, developed in Japan by Kuroda Toshio (1926-1991) and others, which revolutionized the way in which we now look at religious phenomena. He was also one of the first to focus on the cultural and intellectual history of Shinto beyond wartime ideology and stereotypes.

Grapard was steeped in the French philosophical and intellectual tradition, and at the same time felt a profound affinity for Japan, which he visited often for fieldwork and conferences. He especially loved the mountains of the Kyushu region. Fueled by his immense erudition, Grapard’s research on Japanese religious history followed two main lines of inquiry: Shinto-Buddhist interactions and sacred geography (with his long-standing interest in Shugendō mountain religion), with a special focus on the relations between ideas, doctrines, institutions, and practices in a variety of contexts. Grapard was also one the first scholars to highlight the crucial importance of policies in the Meiji period that essentially terminated premodern religious beliefs and practices and brought about a radical transformation of the religious field, with consequences that are still felt today.

Grapard was always attentive to critical theory, cultural analysis, and methodological issues; indeed, he can be considered one of the leaders of the “critical turn” in Japanese religious studies. After his retirement, he continued to share his knowledge with students and scholars around the world and to write and publish original research, in particular on mountain religions in Kyushu and on the role of food in Japanese religions. Many scholars today work along agendas that are based on Grapard’s trailblazing scholarship.

His major publications include La vérité finale des Trois Enseignements (Paris: Poesis, 1982), The Protocol of the Gods: A Study of the Kasuga Cult in Japanese History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and Mountain Mandalas: Shugendō in Kyushu (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), in addition to many impactful articles and book chapters.

Allan Grapard was an adventurous and rigorous intellectual, a witty conversationalist, and an inspiring teacher. He will be sorely missed by his former students and the global scholarly community at large.

We ran into PhD alum, Dr. Jed Forman, in the AAR crowds. He proudly shared his recently published book, Out of Sight into Mind: The History and Philosophy of Yogic Perception. Congratulations, Jed!!

See YOU at the University of California Religious Studies RECEPTION: Sunday 9-11:30 in the Regis Room , Marriott Copley Place, 3rd Floor.

Congratulations to Travis Poortinga, M.A. alumnus on the publication of his book Electric Orange!!

The department's former Ph.D. student, Steven Barrie-Anthony (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2016) contributed an Op-Ed, "I’m a Psychoanalyst. This Is What Technology Is Doing to Us" to the New York Times. His editorial can be read on the New York Times webpage: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/opinion/iphone-therapy-meditation-mindfulness.html.

We congratulate Dr. Barrie-Anthony for this important contribution to public-facing scholarship.

We're happy to announce the exciting news that Elizabeth Pérez was named a finalist in two different literary competitions last week. Her fiction story, "Courtship among the Peoples of Eastern Cuba" was a finalist for the 2025 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest, and her poetic entry was a finalist for the Palette Poetry's 2025 Nature Poetry Prize. We congratulate Professor Pérez on her wonderful contributions!