It is with great sadness that we must announce the death of one of our doctoral students, Nicholas Schonhoffer, who died on Monday January 23rd, 2012.  The Department offers it’s deepest condolences to his family and to all his friends. A memorial was held for Nick on Thursday February 2nd and a Travelling Bursary has been created in his name. Nick will be sorely missed by all who knew him.  Nick was working on a dissertation on the social and political contexts of the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John. He had participated for two years in the archaeological excavations at Bethsaida, Israel and was in the final stages of his doctoral degree.

T. Nicholas Schonhoffer Travelling Bursary Donation Form

In the Winter of 2012, Ronald L. Numbers, Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will be Visiting Professor in the Centre for the United States, and he will teach an undergraduate/graduate course on Science, Medicine, Religion in America in the Department for the Study of Religion. Professor Numbers, an expert in the history of science, medicine, and religion in America, is currently writing a one-volume history of science in America since European settlement and co-editing (with David Lindberg) an eight-volume Cambridge History of Science. Additional works in progress include co-edited volumes on Science and the Christian Tradition (with David Lindberg), and on Modern Science in National and International Context (with David Livingstone). He is the author or editor of books such as Galileo Goes to Jail, and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard University Press, 2009); Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew (Oxford University Press, 2007); The Creationists (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); When Science and Christianity Meet (University of Chicago Press, 2003), edited with David C. Lindberg; Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 1999), edited with John Stenhouse; Darwinism Comes to America (Harvard University Press, 1998); and author of numerous articles.

Jean Baumgarten will be visiting professor in the DSR this coming year. Professor Baumgarten is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre de Recherches Historiques (CHR), Centre d’Études Juives (CEJ), in Paris, France. His primary research areas of interest are: Old Yiddish literature, popular Jewish religion and culture, the cultural history of the Ashkenazi Jewry (Middle Ages–18th century), the linguistics of Jewish languages and the history of the Jewish book in Europe (16th–18th century). Jean Baumgarten is the recipient of research grants from the University of Bologna (Italy), a Skirball Fellowship from the University of Oxford (Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies), and the Charles W. and Sally Rothfeld Research Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania (Center for Advanced Judaic Studies). He is on the editorial board of the Cahiers du Judaïsme. His main publications: Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi de Janow, Le Commentaire sur la Torah (Tseenah ureenah), translated and edited by J. Baumgarten, Paris, 1987, 1994, 2008; Mille ans de cultures ashkénazes (co-ed.), Paris, 1994; Récits hagiographiques juifs, Paris, 2001; Histoire d’une langue errante, Paris, 2002; Linguistique des langues juives et linguistique générale, co-ed. with F. Alvarez-Péreyre, Paris, 2003; Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, Oxford, 2005; La Naissance du hassidisme: Mystique, rite, société, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles, Paris, 2006; Le Peuple des Livres: Les ouvrages populaires dans la société ashkénaze (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), Paris, 2010.

Hear Professor Baumgarten explains how scholars can create a historical frame for Jewish culture today, at the Yiddish Book Center in April 2011.

Dr. Keren Rubinstein will begin teaching Modern Hebrew in the Department for the Study of Religion beginning in the fall of 2011. She received her PhD in Creative Writing and Israeli Literature from Monash University in 2010. Her interdisciplinary doctoral research focused on Israeli life narratives and counter-narratives, collective and contested identity. She has also completed an MA at the University of Melbourne, where she explored Israeli military fiction as a window onto the country’s transforming narratives of nation, gender and ethnicity. She has authored a study of Tel Aviv in the novels of Yaakov Shabtai (in The Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, 2002). She has taught Hebrew and Israeli language and literature at the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and Oberlin College, where she also lectured on Jewish comics and short stories.

The new issue of Symposia, the journal of the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, publishing in this volume articles related to the theme of religion, space, and place, is now available online. This volume is interested in the intersection of religion and space/place, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Articles available include “Public Rationality and Performative Religiosity,” “‘Being’ religious and ‘becoming’ secular in Ireland and France: rescaling secularisation theory,” “Pentecostal Power and the Holy Spirit of Capitalism: Re-territorialization in the Charismatic Cosmology,” “Space, Power, and Stories: hagiography, nationalist discourse, and the construction of sacred space at the Khwaja Sahib in Ajmer, India,” “Travel, the Inn, and Identity in Rabbinic Storytelling,” and several reviews.

From the Chair, John Kloppenborg

2010-11 has been an exciting year! In July we welcomed Simon Coleman, the fifth Chancellor Jackman Chair to be appointed by the U of T. Coleman significantly enhances our strength in the anthropology of religion, in particular the anthropology of modern Christianity. We’ve also been joined by Tobie Strauss, who teaches Modern Hebrew, and we’re preparing to welcome Kyle Smith, whose principal appointment is to the Dept. of Historical Studies at UTM, but who holds his graduate appointment at the DSR. Smith is an expert in early late Roman and early Byzantine Eastern Christianity. Three faculty members have released their first books: Amira Mittermaier’s Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination, Laury Silvers’ A Soaring Minaret: Abu Bakr Al-Wasiti and the Rise of Baghdadi Sufism, and Karen Ruffle’s Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism. DSR faculty have been successful in winning research competitions and awards, too. Amira Mittermaier won a Wenner Gren grant and a SSHRC Standard Research Grant, and Frances Garrett was awarded a prestigious SSHRC Partnership Development grant, bringing to five the number of SSHRC grants held by core DSR faculty. In addition to an OCUFA teaching award, Shafique Virani won a large Early Researcher Award from the Gov’t of Ontario for a project entitled “Journey to the Roof of the World: The travels of Pir Sabzali in Central Asia.” Walid Saleh continues research sponsored by a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. Graduate students have also been busy and notably successful, with a robust contingent of students presenting papers at the annual American Academy of Religion meeting in Montreal and the Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Atlanta. See “Graduate Student News” for an impressive record!

Continue reading Spring Newsletter, 2010-11

The Jackman Humanities Institute has appointed six Undergraduate Fellows for 2011-2012, and two of these are Religion majors. JHI Undergraduate Fellows are linked with faculty fellows who supervise the students’ research projects. Students have carrel space at the JHI and participate in JHI activities. Laura Boles (pictured at right), a Religion, English, and Spanish and Portuguese major, plans during her year-long fellowship to study representations of diaspora and religion in post-9/11 fiction. Her research proposal asks, “How has 9/11 changed the relationship between the immigrant in the United States and the immigrant in Canada, if at all? What do these writings show about the difficulties of assimilation?”

Religion and Buddhist Studies Specialist Christopher Hiebert’s JHI research project is a study of the shifting perceptions and utilization of sacred space in contemporary Tibetan communities in Dharamsala, India, where he will be this summer, and Toronto, over next year. He is particularly interested in how Tibetan concepts and practices associated with sacred geography have mapped onto the urban geography of Toronto and how Tibetan religious practices have changed as a result of being transferred to a “demystified,” urban environment.

Continue reading Undergraduates appointed Jackman Fellows

An Arabic Bible

Professor Walid Saleh was recently featured in the U of T Magazine, with a story on his research into medieval Arabic translations of the Bible.  Journalist John Lorinc explains how Professor Saleh got started on this research: “When Saleh was researching commentaries about the Qur’an some years ago, he stumbled across the writings of a 15th-century Islamic scholar who had become fascinated by a translation of the Bible into Arabic. The medieval scholar had befriended a rabbi who helped him understand the original Hebrew text. The scholar, in turn, wrote impassioned and controversial treatises on how the Bible could be used to interpret the Qur’an.”

Last year, Professor Saleh was one of the first two Canadians to receive the highly competitive New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation. He has spent this year studying the history of the Bible in the Islamic religious imagination, beginning with intensive training in Jewish studies and Biblical Hebrew in order to investigate Islamic interactions with the Bible.

Read the U of T Magazine Story

In celebration of new and upcoming books on Islam by three of our faculty, join us on Wednesday, March 9th, from 5-7 pm, at the University of Toronto Arts Centre, Art Lounge (west of Hart House off Hoskin Ave, on the back campus of University College).

Amira Mittermaier‘s book, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination, came out with University of California Press in December 2010. UCP describes the book as follows: “Dreams that Matter explores the social and material life of dreams in contemporary Cairo. Amira Mittermaier guides the reader through landscapes of the imagination that feature Muslim dream interpreters who draw on Freud, reformists who dismiss all forms of divination as superstition, a Sufi devotional group that keeps a diary of dreams related to its shaykh, and ordinary believers who speak of moving encounters with the Prophet Muhammad. In close dialogue with her Egyptian interlocutors, Islamic textual traditions, and Western theorists, Mittermaier teases out the dream’s ethical, political, and religious implications. Her book is a provocative examination of how present-day Muslims encounter and engage the Divine that offers a different perspective on the Islamic Revival. Dreams That Matter opens up new spaces for an anthropology of the imagination, inviting us to rethink both the imagined and the real.”

Continue reading New and upcoming books on Islam

Eleven Ph.D. students will be traveling to Germany in February 2011, with the support of a DAAD Study Tour Grant. Profs. Amira Mittermaier and Pamela Klassen will be leading the tour of German research institutions focused on the study of religion and religious diversity from both historical and anthropological perspectives. The host institutions include the Max Planck Institute für Bildungsforschung in Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, and the Institut für Religionswissenschaft at the University of Heidelberg.

The students joining the tour have a range of research interests, including contemporary German theories of religion, Jewish philosophy, anthropology of Islam, and Buddhism in Central Asia. Students chosen to participate include Rebecca Bartel, Maria Dasios, Nicholas Dion, Matt King, Rachel Loewen, Nermeen Mouftah, Aldea Mulhern, Paul Nahme, Justin Stein, Edith Szanto, and Erin Vearncombe.

Assistant Professor Ruth Marshall‘s 2009 book, pictured at right, has already received rave reviews. Jean-François Bayart, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, writes,

“This is one of the most original works in the social sciences that I’ve read in several years. Much more than a simple monograph that will be vital for an understanding of religious and political life in Nigeria, this book addresses all those interested in the significance of contemporary religious phenomena. Through her energetic prose, exceptional fieldwork, and clear mastery of the theoretical and ethnographic literature, Marshall offers a new perspective on religious action and social and political transformations in sub-Saharan Africa, while also making a major contribution to the historical and comparative study of religion.”
Continue reading Ruth Marshall on Spiritual Warfare

Image from http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2010/01/03/nacionales/11975

With support from The Wenner Gren Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Kevin O’Neill is pursuing fieldwork for a new book, tentatively titled The Soul of Security.  Based on fieldwork in Guatemala City and across North America, this research brings a new perspective to Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity’s relationship to one of today’s foundational concepts of international order: security.

Professor O’Neill’s first book, City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala, tracked how Christian citizenship re-politicized the faithful in desperately violent Central American urban sites. In this new research project, he focuses on transnational gangs, such as Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18. These groups originated among Central American immigrants in Los Angeles, California, during the gang wars of the 1980s. Since then, United States deportation policies have transported these gangs back to Central America, with some of the strongest networks forming in postwar Guatemala. Today, tens of thousands of men and women, many of whom are former soldiers, now smuggle drugs, participate in human trafficking, and control prison systems. While research currently focuses on why young men and women join these gangs, Professor O’Neill’s project looks instead at the ways out – at two of the most common ways out of a group to which many have already pledged their lives. The first of these is death. The second is Christian conversion.  This curious loophole in gang membership has placed an expanding cadre of Protestant ministers at the intersection of security and salvation, raising a central research question: How does gang ministry exemplify Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity’s growing entanglement with the geopolitics of Central American security?

Three U of T faculty members received recognition from the Ontario Confederation of Faculty Associations for their skills in the classroom.

Professors Susan McCahan of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Shafique Virani of Historical Studies at UTM and Religion at UTSG, and Michael Wiley of anatomy are recipients of the 2010 OCUFA Teaching and Academic Librarianship Awards. Approximately seven awards are given annually to teachers who excel in the classroom.

Shafique Virani has taught everywhere from the banks of the Ganges to Abu Dhabi. He began teaching at Harvard in 2001 before continuing at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates in 2004. In 2006, he moved to Toronto to teach Historical and Religious Studies at U of T Mississauga. This year, he became the Chair of Historical Studies.

“I don’t even think of it as teaching, I think of it as learning,” he said. “People have such fascinating ideas, and if you can draw those ideas out of them, you can learn so much.” Indeed, the learning that comes with teaching is Shafique’s motivation for pursuing the profession.

Continue reading Shafique Virani wins OCUFA Teaching Award

By Eva Mroczek

Before I entered graduate school, I imagined the life of a scholar to be cerebral and solitary and expected to spend days locked in a library pouring over manuscripts. But being a Ph.D. candidate in Centre for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Jewish Studies has taught me that academic life is far more dynamic and social than that. Being part of a scholarly community requires skills far beyond what we learn in class, skills that many of us had the opportunity to hone, under the guidance of Hindy Najman, during the intense flurry of activity at CJS in the last few months.

CJS students are not only intellectually challenged in our field by attending the many events sponsored by CSR and CJS, but we are also actively involved in the behind-the-scenes work of making such scholarly conversations possible in the first place. The Dead Sea Scrolls conference in November gave a group of us the chance to learn what goes into organizing an international gathering of scholars, a project that began a full two years before the event itself and involved careful planning, superhuman attention to detail, and collaboration between several U of T departments, the ROM, and two universities. Chad Stauber of CJS and NMC, Nicole Hilton of CJS and CSR, and I were called upon to help the conference organizers (Hindy Najman, CJS Director, Sarianna Metso of NMC and CSR, and Eileen Schuller of McMaster U.) put together 3 days featuring scholars from N. America, Europe and Israel.
Continue reading Planning for the Dead Sea Scrolls

In the Department for the Study of Religion’s new Research Partnership Program, seven undergraduates and Master’s Degree students are working with faculty and senior graduate students on their research. East Asian Studies major Sophie Zheng, for example, is helping Buddhist Studies doctoral students Ben Wood and Sarah Richardson study Chinese language articles on the Tibetan temple of Shalu, and Religion major Marianna Siniakova is compiling bibliographic sources in Russian on Mongolian Buddhism with doctoral student Matt King. Religion major Daigengna Duoer is working with Professor Amanda Goodman, gathering information from Dunhuang manuscript catalogs of the Stein Collection, the Pelliot Collection and the Beijing Collection.

Religion major Jasveen Puri’s work with PhD candidate Smita Kothari involves translating and transcribing interviews from the Hindi language that Smita conducted during her ethnographic study of a sect in Jainism known as the Terapantha. The study explores notions of charity and meditation practices within this sect and how they relate to social issues, such as ecology, economy and social justice.

Continue reading Research Partnerships Program

By Shaftolu Gulamadov

I worked this year as RA for Shafique Virani, assisting with his courses at the UTM campus. Virani is a lively and inspirational teacher of Islamic history who uses various teaching styles to encourage students to think critically. The aim of the course I worked with was not just to communicate facts, but to help students achieve competency in locating, analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating and applying knowledge in real life, complex situations. I was responsible for creating weekly multiple-choice tests in such a way that they could both test and develop students’ higher order thinking skills.

Before I began designing the tests, I was under the impression that multiple-choice test items were only good for measuring simple recall of facts, i.e., lower-level objectives such as those based on knowledge of terms, methods, procedures, principles and so on. The multiple-choice tests I had seen and taken before seemed only to assess these limited types of well-defined or lower-order skills. This research opportunity has given me the chance to do some serious research on testing methods and how to make them useful for promoting higher order thinking skills. Among many other things, I have carefully studied Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives and categories of cognitive behaviour, Robert Gagne’s hierarchy of learning, Royer Cisero’s theoretical analysis of cognitive behaviour, Thomas Haladyna’s classification of higher order thinking skills and methods of developing and validating multiple-choice test items.

Continue reading Testing Methods and Teaching Islam

The University of Toronto Religion in the Public Sphere Initiative, housed at the Centre for the Study of Religion, invites proposals for the March 2011 RPS Graduate Fellows Workshop. Applications are welcome from advanced graduate students from all faculties, centres, and institutes within the University of Toronto. Students should be working on dissertation research related to the role of religion in public life, broadly conceived, and have a minimum of one chapter completed.

Fellows will meet twice in the winter term of 2011: once in a preparatory workshop, and once at a one-day workshop in March, 2011, where each Fellow will present a research paper and have the chance to invite a scholar to respond to his or her work. The Graduate Fellows will also attend the RPS Public Forum on the topic of Food and Religion, featuring Parama Roy Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Davis, Nigel Savage, founder of Hazon, and Yasir Syeed, co-founder of Green Zabiya.

Applicants should submit the following by December 17, 2010. See Religion in the Public Sphere for details.

By Sean Hillman

Since returning from the International Summer School for Jain Studies in India, the end of which had me giving my first paper presentation ever on “Jain Voluntary Death as a Model for Secular End-of-life Care” in New Delhi, several opportunities to present on the topic have come.  The novel practice of Jain voluntary death was received enthusiastically by Thanadoulas (assistants to the dying) who are in training as part of the Contemplative End-of-life Care program at the Institute of Traditional Medicine, as well as by the director of the program Dr. Michele Chaban, a social worker and leading thanatologist, who plans on incorporating the research into her lectures. Next I presented the paper to both Jains and Jainologists at the University of Ottawa during the “Social Consciousness and Jainism” conference.  Just before classes start I will be again be talking about India and my research at a day-centre for the elderly, which is host to a diverse group that is keen on all things multicultural as well as the subject of death.  This fall I will talk about Jain voluntary death in hospital at Ethics Rounds at the request of Dr. Steve Abdool, a senior ethicist from the Centre for Clinical Ethics and the Joint Centre for Bioethics at U of T, and a co-worker at St. Michael’s Hospital. The paper itself will soon be published in an Indian quarterly Jainology journal called “Sramana” that is produced by the Parshvanath Vidyapeeth Centre for Jain Studies and Research in Varanasi, as well as a second publication in Canada TBA.
Continue reading Jain Studies in India

This summer incoming MA student and Religion graduate Nick Field participated in The Woodenfish Project, Buddhism in China tour for graduate students and professors. With the group he traveled to various historical and modern Buddhist cultural and religious sites over mainland China. The tour included traveling to temples and archeological sites in Jiangsu, Beijing, and Shanxi, as well as a conference on Huayan Buddhism in Mount Wutai and time in the Datong grottos. About the experience Nick writes:

“This summer I had the incredibly good luck to travel across China as part of the 2010 Woodenfish Buddhism in China program. I went with a number of other graduate students to visit several temples and monasteries in mainland China from July 2-22, concluding with a week on the sacred mountain Wutaishan (Five-Terrace Mountain). After the Woodenfish program ended, I spent a week in Xining (Qinghai Province) with our department’s Professor Frances Garrett, who has spent the last year on sabbatical doing research in Xining. For those who are interested, I maintained a Flickr account to display some of the photographs from my trip (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/nf_woodenfish/). It was often hot, smoky and crowded, but I was extremely happy for the entire trip – not only did we get to spend three weeks traveling to temples, monasteries and other sacred sites (including a temple dating from the Tang dynasty!), I made several good friends on the trip and practiced my Chinese (quickly learning the word for “vegetarian food”). If the Woodenfish Buddhism in China program is offered again next year, I would strongly recommend it.”

Continue reading Summer study in China