Teaching, Research, and Outreach Thrive
Greetings!
This year has been exciting and impressive for the Department of Religious Studies. Chancellor Donde Plowman presented the Dr. Marva Rudolph Access and Engagement Unit Excellence Award to the department, and individual faculty have been recognized too. Associate Professor Megan Bryson was honored by the Faculty Senate with its Heart and Soul Award, and Associate Professor Erin Darby was named a 2024-25 Athletics Professor of Excellence.
I am excited to tell you about some of our teaching initiatives. Last year, in collaboration with UT’s Teaching and Learning Innovation, Darby and Associate Professor Rachelle Scott developed a specialized version of our Religious Studies 101 course that targets first-year students who struggle during their first semester of college, to mentor them and teach them critical skills. We also now offer online both the religious studies major and our concentration in religion and nonprofit leadership.
Our faculty have been engaged in some really interesting research. Last year, Assistant Professor Manuela Ceballos had a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, during which she completed her book manuscript Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean. She also had two books come out last year, her translation of Abdelfattah Kilito’s La lengua de Adán y otros relatos (Medellín, Colombia: Editorial Sílaba, 2023), and a co-edited volume, Navigating Language in the Early Islamic World Multilingualism and Language Change in the First Centuries of Islam (Brepols, 2024).
This past summer four of our faculty—Ceballos, Darby, Assistant Professor Marcus Harvey, and Associate Professor Joseph Witt—received stipends to support research initiatives. Harvey is spending this academic year at the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts, completing his first book, “Life Is War”: African Epistemology and Black Religious Phenomenology. He is following in the footsteps of Assistant Professor Larry Perry, who held a Denbo Center fellowship last year.
We are excited that we will be adding a new faculty member next year who will help lead our religion and nonprofit leadership program.
This fall, we hosted our very well-attended annual Siddiqi Lecture on Muslims in the US and a panel on the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial, which featured our own faculty experts talking about the intersections between religion and science. In the spring we hosted the Abraham and Rebecca Solomon and Ida Schwartz Distinguished Lecture on Judaic Studies, featuring Kerry Wallach, and our Distinguished Lecture in Religious Studies was given by Harvard University Professor Tracey Hucks. In March we hosted Rachel Havelock, giving the Karen and Pace Robinson Lecture on Judaic Studies, followed in April by the Anjali annual lecture, a talk titled, “Searching for Sarasvati: Race, Gender, and the Social Lives of Sanskrit in America.”
I hope we will see you soon at one of our events, in person or over Zoom.
On a personal note, I had a very good summer doing research at the Holocaust Museum and doing some preliminary research in Rwanda looking at Rwandan genocide memorials.
Sincerely,
Helene Sinnreich
Professor and Department Head