2024-2025 Events

January - March 2025: Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert

Barbara Sostaita, University of Illinois Chicago

A book talk with Barabara Sostaita that goes into documenting moments of care and intimacy on the migrant trail.

Tuesday, February 18th at 4pm

She is a formerly undocumented writer and scholar of migration and religion. She grew up in the US South, the daughter of a baker and evangelical minister—learning from a young age the importance of ritual in the lives of migrants. Her work traces sacred mobilities and fugitive routes that yearn for, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes, “connection in the face of utter disconnection.” Currently, Sostaita is an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she teaches courses on Latinx religions, transnational migration, and undocumented-led social movements.

Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert, documents moments of care and intimacy on the migrant trail. Her collaborators include migrants melting the border’s steel bars through curative touch, artists summoning the migrant dead, and activists leaving water in the Sonoran Desert—in defiance of prevention through deterrence, in celebration of life that exceeds walls and bans. The book also traces her own journey to becoming an American citizen. She is also at work on her second book, An Infinity of Traces, a collection of essays on my father's conversion to Christianity, his work ministering to undocumented people in the rural south, and the reasons her family left Argentina.

Professor Sostaita's writing has appeared in The Nation, Bitch, Teen Vogue, and Remezcla among others. When she is not writing or teaching, Sostaita serve as the Higher Education Director for Migrant Roots Media—a platform that centers the voices of migrants, children of migrants, and people struggling to stay and thrive in their homelands.

September - December 2024:

"Life after Death: Ritual and Placemaking in Old Delhi."

November 13, 2024 at 4pm

Kalyani Devaki Menon is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University. Her research focuses on religious politics in contemporary India. She is the author of two books, Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India (Pennsylvania 2010) and Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India (Cornell 2022).

"I Contain Multitudes": Jewish reckonings in a Muslim Household

November 7, 2024 at 12:30pm

The Global Religion and Politics Research Group hosts PhD candidate in Anthropology, Idil Ozkan (Northwestern University).

This paper traces how converso (Sabbatean) Jews reckon with their religious ancestry in the context of reparations in Spain and Portugal. Five hundred years after the horrors of the Catholic Inquisition, the Spanish and Portuguese governments extended citizenship in 2015 to Jews worldwide, provided the applicants evidenced their Sephardic ancestry. While the offer sparked widespread interest and fostered reconciliation for many Sephardic people in the Global South, it also brought about moral dilemmas and anxieties for others. Among those for whom the citizenship offer had unintended consequences were Selanikli in Turkey. This subgroup of Sephardic Jews from Ottoman Salonika had converted in the 17th century from Judaism to Islam following the self-proclaimed messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. 

2023-24 Events

 September - December 2023: Visiting Scholar Benjamin Schonthal

Benjamin Schonthal, University of Otago

Panel with Benjamin Schonthal and Levi McLaughlin (with grad respondents Emma Davis and Matthew Drew), "New Directions in the Study of Religion, Law, and Public Life"

Thursday, October 19th at 4pm

Benjamin Schonthal is Professor of Buddhist Studies and the Head of the Religion Programme at the University of Otago in NZ. His work examines the intersections of religion, law and politics in late-colonial and contemporary Southern Asia, with a focus on Buddhism and law in Sri Lanka. He’s the author of Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law (Cambridge 2016) and more than 40 chapters and journal articles. With Tom Ginsburg, he has just co-edited Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law (Cambridge 2023). In 2016 he received the Otago University Award for Distinction in Research (Early Career) and 2021 the Rowheath Trust Award and Carl Smith Medal. His current research project, Law's Karma, examines the politics and practice of Buddhist law in contemporary South and Southeast Asia.

Talk: “Making the Rule of Law in a Sri Lankan Buddhist Monastery”

2022-2023 Events

Dr. Anoush Tamar Suni, Northwestern University 
Tuesday, February 28 at 12pm 

Dr. Elayne Oliphant, New York University
The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris 
Wednesday, February 15 at 4pm

Film Screening at AAR, Friday, November 18, 8:00pm

We are excited to be sponsoring a film screening and panel at the American Academy of Religion 2022 annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. See below for details.