Department of Religion

Critique, Image & Politics Concentration

The Department of Religion offers the graduate concentration in Critique, Image & Politics to explore how religions shape and are shaped in aesthetics, ethics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and political and culture theory.

The Critique, Image & Politics curriculum consists of four thematic clusters of courses. Students may repeat a given course up to three times so long as it is offered with a different subtitle reflecting different material.

Corporealities in the Study of Religion

• Classical and recent theorizations of embodiment, body, flesh, and materiality, including philosophical ontologies as well as theories of gender and sexuality. 
• Courses include Self-Body-Transcendence, Image of the Body, or Deleuze & Foucault

Images in the Study of Religion

• Theoretical approaches in the study of religion to objects and events as reflected in the image, and to the image in art, film, and technology. 
• Courses include Religion, Art, Aesthetics, Mass Culture, or Religion, Art, Politics

Thought in the Study of Religion

• Key figures and texts in continental philosophy of religion, including hermeneutical, phenomenological, and post-phenomenological approaches.
• Courses include Continental Philosophy of Religion, Political Theology, Theology and Liberation, Islamic Metaphysics and Epistemology, or Life, Philosophy and Phenomenology. 

Subjectivities in the Study of Religion

• Methodological approaches to the formation of critical subjects under the rubrics of ethics, psychoanalytic theory, theories of consciousness and the sociology of religion.
• Courses include Postmodern Ethics, Post Freudian Psychoanalysis, Sociology of Religion, or Prophecy and Imagination

Core Faculty for the Critique, Image & Politics concentration

• Ahmed Abdel Meguid
• Zachary J. Braiterman
• Biko Mandela Gray
• M. Gail Hamner
• Ernest Wallwork

Associated Religion Faculty for the Critique, Image & Politics concentration

• William Robert
• Marcia Robinson