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Travis Scott

Travis Scott is a graduate student in the History of Art department, where he works on Classical art with an emphasis on religion, cult, ritual, and community formation in the Greek world. Supported by interests in critical theory and archaeology and with a background in studio art, his work investigates alternatives modes of looking at objects that have been under surveillance for centuries.
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Lee Wiles-Op

After winding upward on a curving inclined ramp through the middle of the North Visitors Center at Salt Lake City's Temple Square, one might be asked by a pair of young sister missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., LDS, Mormons) whether s/he would like to "see a short presentation on the family." Without inquiring as to the type of family that might be presented, the visitor responds affirmatively. S/he is then led further upward—moving away from an eleven foot replica of Bertel Thorvaldsen's Christus that stands framed by a depiction of the cosmos, its gaze cast downward, hands and feet displaying the wounds inflicted on Christ during his crucifixion. On the next floor, s/he would be ushered into a small, bland room beyond which a dark cavern—space yet to be explored—lingers just out of reach of the room's slightly dimmed light. The visitor is asked to sit, and s/he does.
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Karen Spierling

I am a scholar of the Reformation period in Western Europe, and particularly of the development and spread of Reformed (Calvinist) Christianity. One of the key questions driving my research is the nature of the relationship between religious ideas and practices. In my work, I seek to examine how social, political, and economic factors, among others, interacted with doctrinal concerns to both influence the articulation of religious ideas and affect how those ideas were put into practice.
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Inventing the Latino Superhero: Same Myth, Different Masks

Mauricio Espinoza is a doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and a recent recipient of support from the Iles Fund for the Study of Myth. About his work, he writes:

The Iles Fund allowed me to present my paper - "Inventing the Latino Superhero: Representation, Cultural Identity and Myth in the Construction of Latino/a Heroic Figures and Discourses in Contemporary U.S. Comics" - at the 2009 Kentucky Foreign Language Conference (KFLC), April 16-18, at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. KFLC is one of the largest conferences of its kind in the United States.
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Racial Holy War: The Creativity Movement and the War on Terror

Damon T. Berry, Graduate Student in Comparative Studies

Damon Berry is a graduate student in Comparative Studies with a focus on religious studies and with interests in critical theory, critical race theory, and cultural studies. His interests are in the confluences of racialization and religion, especially in the United States. His previous research has been conducted on The Order, a white supremacist criminal organization which operated in the U.S. in the 1980's, and Odinism, a contemporary adaptation of ancient Nordic mythologies. More recent examinations which he has undertaken have been in The Nation of Islam, Black Liberation Theology, and Rastafarianism as movements which have formed in part as a response to white supremacy and as counter hegemonic discourses which have empowered some to express themselves in the midst of violent and systemic racial oppression.
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Kafka in Space (Parsing the Eruv) on exhibition now

Suzanne Silver, Assistant Professor Art, is one of the artists currently exhibiting work as part of a show entitled Of Other Spaces, running through April 25, 2009, at the Bureau for Open Culture, the Canzani Center Gallery, the Columbus College of Art and Design.
Kafka in Space (Parsing the Eruv)

New Light on Ancient Theogonies

In her forthcoming book, When the Earth Was Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East (Harvard University Press), Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin Carolina López-Ruiz brings the comparative study of Greek and Near Eastern cosmogonies to a different level. Rather than compile more literary parallels from different periods and languages and treat the Near East as a monolithic matrix, she focuses on the motifs specific to the Northwest Semitic tradition, with which the Greeks had the most direct contact.
New Light on Ancient Theogonies

Medieval Jewish and Buddhist Morality

Ilana Maymind, a PhD Candidate in the department of Comparative Studies is working on the relationship between religion and ethics. Her dissertation project is tentatively titled "Through the Eyes of Maimonides and Shinran: Is Law a Prerequisite for Morality?" Her work will focus on juxtaposing the views of Shinran (1173-1263) a Japanese Buddhist monk, philosopher and the founder of the Jodo Shinshu sect in Japan and Maimonides (1135-1204) a Medieval Jewish rabbi, philosopher and a physician.
Medieval Jewish and Buddhist Morality

Ann Corley Silverman Art Exhibition Explores Religion

Ann Corley Silverman, a Columbus artist and friend of the Center for the Study of Religion, often thinks about issues of religion and spirituality when creating her works, which focus on the medium of handmade paper. Some of her most recent creations now comprise an exhibition entitled 'Material and Metaphor' at the Concourse Gallery of the Upper Arlington Municipal Services Center, 3600 Tremont Road.
When asked about her recent work and how thoughts of religion motivate it, Ann replied as follows:...
Ann Corley Silverman Art Exhibition Explores Religion

New Insights on an Old God: Apollo

Fritz Graf, Professor and Chair of Greek and Latin and Director of Epigraphy at the Center for Epigraphic and Palaeographic Studies at Ohio State, is one of the world’s leading experts on ancient Mediterranean myths and religions. His most recent book, Apollo, will be published by Routledge on October 16, 2008. When asked what he had set out to do in this book, Graf responded as follows:...
New Insights on an Old God: Apollo, Complete Article.

Courtship Culture and Contemporary Christianity

Beth Shively, a graduate student in the department of Comparative Studies, recently completed coursework for her PhD, including a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Sexuality Studies. She earned a Master’s Degree in Women's Studies from The George Washington University in 2007.

Beth’s research interests are American Christianity, sexuality, consumption and critical, social and cultural theory. Her dissertation project will document the development of "courtship culture"-a movement among contemporary Christian teens which rejects traditional dating practices in favor of a courtship model and its attendant values of sexual and emotional abstinence. The bestseller I Kissed Dating Goodbye, the True Love Waits campaign, purity balls and purity rings and abstinence pledges are all facets of this growing movement. Beth hopes to explore the ways that courtship culture and those who practice it understand gender, the body and the culturally linked appetites for food and sex. She also plans to analyze the ways that courtship culture affects and reflects the ideal of the Protestant ethic and American patterns of labor and consumption.

Post-Secular Queer

Norman Jones is an assistant professor in the Department of English on the Mansfield campus. He specializes in twentieth-century American literature and sexuality studies. An affiliate of the Center for the Study of Religion, his research explores intersections of the sacred and the secular, focusing especially on the vexed and complicated relationship between queer subjectivities and Christianity.
Post-Secular Queer, Complete Article

Sin, Sex and Democracy

Cynthia Burack is an associate professor in the Department of Women's Studies. Burack's training is in political theory, and her research explores identity group politics, including the ways in which group relations, discourses, and ideologies are central to social theory and political practice. For the last several years her research has focused on the sexuality politics of the US Christian right.

Professor Burack's latest book, Sin, Sex, and Democracy: Antigay Rhetoric and the Christian Right (SUNY Press, 2008) offers a model that decodes ideological rhetoric about same-sex sexuality in the conservative Christian movement. Through three case studies, she shows how Christian right leaders craft and disseminate antigay rhetoric that is carefully differentiated by socio-political context as well as by the audiences for which it is intended. The success of its rhetorical strategies contributes to the perception that the movement has abandoned both its abomination rhetoric and its aspirations to use legal and cultural mechanisms to punish and restigmatize same-sex sexuality.

In her new work Burack investigates the compassion discourse of the Christian right, interpreting it using the work of theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Ayn Rand, and Melanie Klein. She uses theoretical resources and Christian right "texts" to analyze the development and deployment of compassion by movement elites, the reception and deployment of compassion by activists, the justifications that represent compassion as a compelling form of social and political action, and the significance of rhetorics of deservingness that structure Christian right compassion.

Archaeology and Iconongraphy of Ancient Religions

Katie Rask is a PhD student in the History of Art Department at OSU. An affiliate of the Center, Katie has spent the last three years taking part, as well, in the Focus Program for Religions and Cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean, which is cosponsored by the Departments of Greek and Latin and History of Art. Having recently finished her candidacy exams, Katie will spend the 2008-9 school year in the Regular Program of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, in support of which she has received a School Fellowship. While there, she will begin her dissertation on the art and archaeology of Greek religion.

Katie’s research centers on ritual in the Greek world and the ways that archaeology is used to reconstruct past religious practice. Her dissertation will focus on the use of iconographic representations in the scholarship on Greek religion and will trace the development of iconographic studies in the field of classics. Using several case studies, she will propose new ways of interpreting iconography in light of ritual theory. She is particularly interested in how the new 'archaeologies of religion' and 'archaeologies of ritual' can aid our understanding of the social, communicative and cultural use of religious iconography in the ancient world.
Archaeology and Iconongraphy, complete article

Late Antique Philosophy and Religion

Ilinca Tanaseanu-Doebler received her PhD in the History of Religions 2005 from the University of Bayreuth. After working as assistant professor at the University of Bayreuth and at the University of Göttingen in the interdisciplinary research group on ancient religion and philosophy 'Ratio religionis', she received a two-year scholarship from the German Research Foundation which has allowed her to come to the Center for the Study of Religion as a Visiting Scholar to work on her current project on theurgy.

In her first book 'Konversion zur Philosophie in der Spätantike' Dr. Tanaseanu-Doebler concentrated on conversion to philosophy in Late Antiquity. Since A. D. Nock there had been no systematic treatment of the subject, and Nock himself analysed normative accounts of conversion rather than considering 'real' people. Applying modern conversion theories to the sources she has traced the decisive role of philosophy in shaping the social and religious identity of two figures who shared a commitment to Neoplatonism while becoming engaged with different religious traditions: the emperor Julian, who converted from Christianity to paganism, and Synesius of Cyrene, who eventually became a Christian bishop. The identity of the philosopher proved to be pervasive in both authors, determining their worldview and the mode of their respective relationship to other aspects of Late Antique religion and society.
Late Antique Philosophy and Religion, complete article.

Mu'tazilism and the Shiites

Bruce Fudge is an assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. When asked about his current work, he replied:

My recent work focuses on a medieval Shiite commentary on the Qur'an. The commentary’s author is the well-known scholar from what is now northeastern Iran, al-Tabrisi, who died in the mid-twelfth century. (One of the advantages of a relatively small field such as Islamic studies is that even works that are quite well known remain little studied.)

There are many interesting aspects to al-Tabrisi's work of Qur'an interpretation, but one of the most important, to my mind, is the influence of an Islamic theological group known as the Mu'tazila. By al-Tabrisi’s time, the Mu'tazila had largely ceased to be players on the Islamic intellectual scene, but they had been very influential in the formative period of Islamic thought. However, despite their own decline, a number of Mu'tazilite doctrines were adopted by Shiite thinkers, in a process that seems to have occurred mainly in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Al-Tabrisi's Qur'an commentary is, in fact, largely an amalgam of earlier works, and is comprised of more or less equal parts of both Mu’tazilite exegesis and previous Shiite scholarship. This is a striking combination, for reasons I will explain.
Mu'tazilism and the Shiites, complete article

Hugh Urban researches Hindu Goddess in India

Hugh Urban, professor of religious studies in the department of Comparative Studies, just returned from a research trip to Assam, India, to finish a project he has been working on since 2000.

Professor Urban's research focuses on the worship of the Hindu goddess Kamakhya and her temple near Guwahati, Assam. This temple is one of the oldest and most important "seats of power" (shakta pithas), or centers of the goddess' divine energy, that dot the sacred landscape of South Asia. 'Indeed, Kamakhya is believed to be the locus of the goddess' yoni or sexual organ, making it literally the "mother of all places of power." It is the site of the goddess' annual menstruation, which takes place for three days each summer when her life-giving blood renews the earth and brings divine grace to her devotees. And it is also a major site of animal sacrifice, as blood is returned to the goddess with the regular offering of goats, buffaloes, pigeons and fish.

Professor Urban's research has resulted in several articles and will be published in a book by I.B. Tauris under the title "The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies."

The photo shows Professor Urban at Kamakhya temple with Subhas Bhagavati, a Shakta Tantric priest from Nalbari, Assam.

Stephen Dale Enjoying Productive NEH year

Stephen Dale, Professor of History, is currently enjoying a year of fellowship funded by the NEH.

Professor Dale's year off will enable him to complete a book that comparatively treats the Ottoman Empire (which had its capital at Istanbul and was at the height of its power in the 16th and 17th centuries), the Safavid Empire (which was centered in Iran and held power from the early 16th century to the early 18th century) and the Mughal Empire (which ruled much of the Indian sub-continent from the early 16th to the mid 19th century) as parts of a larger civilization. Professor Dale will approach these empires in a manner similar to that in which scholars of Europe write histories of countries that are distinct in many ways as entities, but that are also parts of a single, larger civilization.

The book, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2009, will include discussion of the art and literature of these cultures.

Professor Dale's earlier work has involved many aspects of Islamic civilization, including study of one of the oldest Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent, the Mappilas of Malabar.

The photo shows Professor Dale, on the left, with his friend M.N Karassery, a prominent Muslim literary scholar, translator and critic from the University of Calicut.

Situating the New Testament Within Its Intellectual and Ritual Contexts

The Center for the Study of Religion welcomes participation not only from Ohio State faculty members and students, but from anyone in the central Ohio area. The following is a piece written by our new neighbor, Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll, who is an Assistant Professor of New Testament at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, Delaware, OH. Steve writes:

After receiving my Ph.D. under the direction of Adela Collins and Hans-Josef Klauck at the University of Chicago, I have focused on contextualizing the writings of the New Testament within the thought systems and religious activity of the ancient world in which they were written. Along with Master’s level courses on particular books of the New Testament that try to address this issue, I also teach “Religion and Religious Practice in the Greco-Roman World” and “Expressions of Identity in Second Temple Judaism,” both of which try to understand better the literature, social life, and ritual activity that shaped ancient cultures from a religious perspective.
Situating the New Testament Within Its Intellectual and Ritual Contexts, complete article.

New Fund for Students of Myth

The newly established Robert L. Iles Fund for the Study of Myth will provide small grants for graduate students in the College of Humanities or College of Arts who need to travel to conduct or present their research on myth.

Robert L. Iles (1934-2007) earned a master's degree in English Literature at Bowling Green State University and began his career as a teacher of high school English in Perrysburg Ohio, where he encouraged his students to read, study and enjoy myths. He subsequently became a medical journalist and a published author of mystery novels and short stories, many of which were set in the southern Ohio landscape where he grew up (e.g., Dead Wrong, 1999; Incidental Death, 2007). His daughter, Sarah Iles Johnston, and his son-in-law, Fritz Graf, are professors in Ohio State's Department of Greek and Latin, where they both frequently teach graduate and undergraduate courses on ancient myths and religions.

The Iles fund will be administered through the Center for the Study of Religion. Graduate students may begin submitting applications in September of 2008 that will provide support as early as Winter Quarter 2009; please contact the Center for further information.

To support the academic study of myth at Ohio State by contributing to the Iles Fund, please contact Margo Wolanin (wolanin.2@osu.edu).

Visiting Scholar Studies Witches and Bears

Laura Cherubini, a doctoral student working with Maurizio Bettini and Roberto Danese at the Centro Antropologia e Mondo Antico, Università degli Studi di Siena, is the Center's first Visiting Scholar. Laura is completing a dissertation on the ancient Greek, Roman and medieval portraits of the witch and related female creatures of the supernatural world. Last year, she spent several months at Ohio State studying with Professors Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston of the Department of Greek and Latin, and she returned this year as a guest of the Center to further pursue her studies.
Witches and Bears, complete article.

The Role of Anthropomorphism in Greek Religion

Bridget Buchholz is a graduate student in the Department of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University. She is currently writing her dissertation which deals with the interdependence of myth and cult within religion. Bridget’s dissertation discusses the role of anthropomorphism within Greek Religion. The dissertation addresses not what is found in literature or even how it is portrayed there but instead seeks through an analysis of the texts, the what and how, to answer the larger cultural question of why the gods are portrayed in certain ways.
The Role of Anthropomorphism in Greek Religion, complete article.

Outside the Text: Sources of Non-Textual Meaning in Rabbinic Civilization

Michael D. Swartz, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

In April 2008 I will be delivering the inaugural lectures in the Benita and Sigmund Stahl Lecture Program in Jewish Studies at New York University. The lectures will be entitled “Outside the Text: Source of Non-Textual Meaning in Rabbinic Civilization.” The lectures bring together several themes I have been researching over the past few years. Judaism is thought to be the logocentric culture par excellence. Rabbinic literature, the formative literature of Judaism of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, is grounded in a mythic system by which the Torah is said to have formed the blueprint for the world. As a result, most historians of ancient Judaism understand it as finding meaning exclusively in textual sources. However, there is another approach to meaning to be found in ancient and medieval Judaism. This approach sees meaning in the natural world and derives it from visual clues rather than textual ones. According to this conception, the natural world and physical manifestations of the divine covenant contain hidden signifiers to be decoded according to complex systems of interpretation. These include divination, symbolic interpretation of physical features and dress, and interpretations of historical events.
Outside the Text, complete article.

Ancient Arabian Religion and the Lives of Nomadic Cattle Pastoralists

Joy McCorriston, Associate Professor of Anthropology

For more than 100 years, both Western scholars and some of Islam's earliest chroniclers have argued that the religious practices of Islam came from the desert nomads that fringed the settled world of the ancient Near East. In the 8th C AD, Ibn Kalbi traced the idolatry expelled from Mecca to the corrupted practices desert dwellers inherited from the sons of Adam. Ibn Khaldun'13th century sweeping history of civilization invoked the society of Bedouins in the rise of the Prophet Muhammad, (leaving aside Muhammad's urbane roots in Mecca). Western scholars who assumed that Islam was heavily influenced by the (minority) Arabian Jews and Christians of the 6th century have been no less dismissive of the contributions of Arabia's own high civilizations. Because Arabia's indigenous kingdoms and great cities in Saba, Qataban, Hadramawt and Ma'in were perceived to have contributed nothing enduring to Arabian civilization, their genesis was long ignored and their influence on subsequent culture greatly underestimated.
Ancient Arabian Religion, complete article.

Households and Bishops in Early Christianity

Kristina Sessa, Assistant Professor of History

I study the history and religion of the late antique Mediterranean world, ca. 300-700 CE, with a geographic focus on the western half of Empire, especially the Italian peninsula and North Africa. My training has been in the interrelated fields of Early Christianity, Classics and the social history of the Roman Empire, though I am also very interested in Roman religions, classical and early medieval material culture (especially domestic architecture and space), and the history of religious belief and community.
Households and Bishops, complete article.

How Religion Constructs the Family

Rita Trimble, Graduate Student in Comparative Studies

Rita Trimble is a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research interest is in the intersection of religion and family, and is centered on how American churches and their members work together to construct visual and narrative images of the ideal family/citizens, what kinds of families that includes or marginalizes, and how that relates to current family values rhetoric and public policy.
How Religion Constructs the Family, complete article.