Prof. Joseph (Joe) O’Connell, professor emeritus of Hinduism at the Department for the Study of Religion, and long-time associate of St. Michael’s College, passed away on Sunday 6 May at the age of 72, following a brain haemorrhage while in New York. He was born in Boston in 1940. Joe had taught at the University for more than thirty years.

Prof. O’Connell served as the Academic Director at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in 1999–2000 and since then was also a Senior Associate Fellow of the Centre.  Most recently he was a visiting professor at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he was instrumental in the development of a department of World Religions – a discipline that is largely non-existent in South Asia.

He was an exceptional scholar, who did much for the study of Gaudiya Vaishnavism since his PhD in the 1950s on the social aspects of the Chaitanya movement. He has published widely on the history of Vaishnavism in Bengal, and on the social and ethical issues in the tradition. 

He is survived by his wife, Kathleen O’Connell, a daughter and two sons. 

Joe was a kind and generous scholar, and a man of integrity and character. He will be missed by all.

A memorial service will be held for Joe at St Basil’s Church, University of Toronto, May 15 at 3:00pm.

T. Nicholas Schonhoffer Travelling Bursary Donation Form

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

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!

This year we’ve welcomed Dr. Mona Schrempf as a DAAD Visiting Professor. Dr. Schrempf, an expert in Tibetan religion and culture, taught two seminars on Buddhism and has interacted with faculty and graduate students working on Tibet. Two visiting scholars from Iran have spent productive time at the department too: Dr. Babak Farzaneh works on Qur’anic lexicography and Dr. Sayeh Meisami works on Islamic philosophy and leads an Islamic philosophy reading group (see pg 4). In a few weeks another visiting researcher will join us, Dr. Samah Ahmed, doing a project on religious pluralism and education in Islam in Canadian society.

For the second year, I am taking graduate students to Israel to participate in the excavations of et-Tel, probably the ancient city of Bethsaida-Julias (see the photograph above and the page 3 story, “Digging in Bethsaida”). This is funded through the generosity of the Canadian Friends of Hebrew University, and the students, in addition to excavating at Bethsaida, will visit the excavations of Sepphoris, conducted by Hebrew University Prof. Zeev Weiss, as well as other archaeological sites in Israel. Another grant, this time from the DAAD, allowed Prof. Pamela Klassen to take ten graduate students with her to Germany in February to visit research institutions focused on the study of religion and religious diversity. 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 Religions-wissenschaft at the University of Heidelberg. Yet another DSR faculty member, Prof. Joseph Bryant, taught a summer course at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

As always, as Chair I express my deep appreciation to our administrative staff, Irene Kao, Marilyn Colaco, and Fereshteh Hashemi, and to my fellow department administrative colleagues, Drs. Frances Garrett and Jennifer Harris, whose support, creativity, energy, and scholarship make this a great place to be.

Download the 2010-11 Newsletter

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.

Mr. Hiebert has also been awarded a University of Toronto Excellence Award in the Social Sciences and Humanities, of which only seven are awarded at the University. For this project, he will work with Professor Frances Garret’s research project, Gold, Statue, Text: Visualizing Movement in Tibetan History. Mr. Hiebert will work on mapping sacred Buddhist sites around the Tibetan settlement in Dharamsala, India, analyzing how Tibetans conceive of, construct, and relate to sacred spaces, assessing the types of sacred spaces that Tibetans create (such as monasteries or natural features of the landscape), and documenting the matrix of practices (such as pilgrimage, circumambulation, and rituals) that are connected to specific sacred spaces.