2025 December Roundup DSR Newsletter - Contents

Message from the Chair and Graduate Chair, Professor Pamela Klassen, FRSC

Welcome to the 2025 holiday edition of the DSR newsletter! Our 50th anniversary celebrations are in full swing, with DSR alumni, faculty, students and friends gathering for events here in Toronto and at the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meetings in Boston. In addition to a festive DSR Alumni & Friends party in Boston, an AAR panel featured DSR alumni from four decades presenting their perspectives in “A View from Canada: Toronto and the ‘American’ Academy for the Study of Religion.”

With several faculty searches underway, we will have exciting news to share in 2026 about new colleagues joining the DSR. Our vibrant MA and PhD student community continues to be at the heart of the DSR mission, as the next generation of researchers and teachers. I am also pleased to report that undergraduate students continue to flock to our classes, eager to develop the critical tools to understand the significance of religion, past and present.

In this anniversary year, I have had meaningful opportunities to connect and reconnect with alumni from many generations. These conversations have helped me to realize in a new way the importance of the DSR’s contribution to the wider field of the study of religion, as well as to the individual trajectories of so many students’ lives.

As we look forward to the next 50 years of advancing the critical and creative study of religion in the world around us, I am grateful for the support of so many alumni, as student mentors, as returning lecturers, and as generous donors. We’ll be sharing exciting updates about new donations for student scholarships in the near future. If you would like to talk about ways you might contribute to the future success of the DSR, please be in touch with me at chair.religion@utoronto.ca. 

Thank you for reading our newsletter! 

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