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An upward view of Fowler Hall on the 鶹Ƶ campus

Something exciting is always happening in the Religious Studies department! Read on to find out what’s new this year.

This year, we have had another vibrant year in the department, offering courses on a wide range of topics from across time and space, including The History of the Devil; Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism; “Cults” and “Sects”: New Religious Movements in the Americas; Islam and Capitalism; Displaced People of the Mediterranean; and How to Live in the Midst of Dying: Religion and Climate Change.

In these courses, students have had dynamic opportunities to engage with LA’s diverse religious communities. For example, in the Fall of 2023, Prof. Kim Diaz’s class, Religion, Liberation, and Latin American Social Movements visited Olvera Street during the week of Dia de los Muertos. This is a time where local communities honor the dead through community altars, entertainment, and a daily procession. In the words of the Olvera Street Merchants Association Foundation, "Preserving our past to enlighten our future."  

students from the Transpacific Movements and Activisms: Asian and Asian American Activism across the Pacific course

Prof. Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa co-taught a course with colleagues in the History Department, Prof. Sasha Day and Prof. Jane Hong, that was entitled Transpacific Movements and Activisms: Asian and Asian American Activism across the Pacific. The course provided students with the opportunity to learn about Asian American histories in Los Angeles, and included visits to the and. The course culminated in the students researching and writing their own StoryMaps related to important neighborhoods in LA. 

A group of students who worked with Migrants of the Mediterranean

Our courses also include original and engaging assessment opportunities. For example in the Fall semester, Prof. Kristi Upson-Saia’s course, “Displaced Peoples of the Mediterranean,” partnered with (MotM), an organization that documents the stories of people whose migration journeys include the dangerous crossing the Mediterranean Sea. , embedded for two weeks in the course to familiarize students with the organization, its aims and methodologies, and to expose them to the policies, practices, and humanitarian crises of contemporary migration in the Mediterranean region. For the next three weeks, students created resources for MotM: they conducted scholarly research on the impact of humanitarian storytelling, they turned scholarly insights into “Talking Points” that MotM staff can use in their advocacy efforts, and they created a set of visual resources for the MotM website, fundraising, and presentation materials.

screenshot of the learning tool Mentimeter

Professor Sohaib Khan has been experimenting with the learning tool "Mentimeter" to facilitate equitable participation in his classes on Islam. Students are given a multiple-choice question prompt on the screen, which they can access on their phones by scanning a barcode. Their responses to the MCQ are collated in a graph and displayed on screen for further discussion. This activity facilitates an interactive and equitable class participation experience, especially in larger classes where international and non-native English-speaking students might find it challenging to have their voices heard.

Lecture by Dr. Rasul Miller

Students in the department have the opportunity to learn from scholars engaged in the latest cutting edge research in their fields. For example, in Prof. Khan’s Spring course, Islam and Capitalism, students were visited by from the Department of History at the University of California Irvine. Professor Miller’s talk, titled “From Black Power to Palestinian Liberation: Combating Racial Capitalism through Global Solidarity,” discussed the overlooked history of black internationalist movements in the fight against colonial racial capitalism between the US and the Middle East. 

chisme: an unconventional site of liberation theology

In Prof. Diaz’s Spring course "Indecent" Liberation in Latin America, from the Religious Studies Department at the University of Dayton guest lectured on chisme as an unconventional site of liberation theology. Occidental librarian Erin Sulla also visited the class twice throughout the semester, guiding students with the practical aspects of research as well as zine-making. During class at the end of week thirteen, students created their own zines that visually depicted their final research project. They presented their zines on the last few days of class. 

We are so proud of our graduating seniors this year, Jay Corrigan and Ava Wampold, who worked with Prof. Mike Amoruso in our senior seminar to complete comprehensive projects on important issues of the day, including psychedelic capitalism and religion and Jewish menstrual purity laws, respectively. 

Nathan Fisher

We are thankful to our amazing visiting professors this year, and congratulate them on their successes. Prof. Nathan Fisher, who taught Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism in the Fall, completed his PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara. Prof. Kirsten Boles taught Queering Religion in the Spring, and will be moving to a new position as Prevention and Education Coordinator in the Title IX and Gender Equity Office at Cal State Fullerton. Good luck, Prof. Fisher and Prof. Boles!

Kirsten Boles

 

RELS Professor Sohaib Khan

We are excited to share the excellent news that Professor Sohaib Khan will be joining us in the Fall semester of 2023 as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies, which will become a continuing Assistant Professor position in his second year. Professor Sohaib Khan is a scholar of comparative Islamic studies interested in connections between religion, secularism and economic life in Muslim societies. His research, teaching and public scholarship lie at the intersection of Islamic studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and area studies of South Asia and the Middle East. Trained as an interdisciplinary historian and ethnographer, Professor Khan received his Ph.D. (2020) from Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) and the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and is joining us from Pomona College. Welcome Professor Khan!

This has been an exhilarating year in the Department of Religious Studies, as we have worked to present courses and opportunities to students that reflect the rich complexity and vital challenges faced by global communities: health, economic, and social inequalities; climate change; and an ever-changing dynamic world.

Our department’s own Prof. Upson-Saia has co-led an initiative on campus, Humanities for Just Communities (or HJC), to demonstrate the power of the Humanities to advance social justice. The HJC curriculum includes a virtual summer course for incoming frosh, a set of courses during the academic year, and teams of research students over the summer. You can read more about the work of the first cohort in 2022-2023--which was focused on the theme of health justice--in the 鶹Ƶnews article linked here. Next year’s theme will be on displaced and migrating peoples.

As part of the HJC initiative, in Fall 2022 Prof. Upson-Saia team-taught a course with Philosopher Prof. Morrisey called “Envisioning and Enacting Health Justice.” In the course, students considered various conceptualizations of what “health justice” looks like, and then applied these concepts to three case studies on the patient-provider relationships, reproductive health, and end-of-life care. At the end of the semester, students put what they learned to work in one of five community-based projects with Oxy’s Office for Disability Services, Oxy’s Office of Pre-Health, and Planned Parenthood of Pasadena/San Gabriel Valley. 

RELS 120 course presentation

Another RELS course connected to the HJC was Prof. Holmes-Tagchungdarpa’s course, "Flourishing in a World on Fire: Cosmologies of Multispecies Health in the Anthropocene". This course focused on how Indigenous and local communities in the Pacific-Asia region conceptualize and respond to the challenges brought by climate change. The course centered cosmological visions of relatedness across human and more-than-human scales. At the end, students created multimedia projects that allowed them to reflect on and share what they had learned from the course. 

RELS Omar pictures

Beyond our HJC classes, other classes and events in the RELS department center the themes of justice, wellbeing, and centering voices that have been historically marginalized. In Fall 2022, Prof. Mixon developed an exciting series of events in her Islamic Studies courses around the critically-lauded opera . This opera made its West Coast debut in L.A. over several weeks in late 2022, and portrayed the remarkable story of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim scholar stolen from Senegal and brought to America in 1807. He wrote his autobiography in Arabic in 1831, and the opera presents his experience in an entirely new medium. Prof. Mixon also hosted a series of lectures featuring leading scholars on related themes and new research regarding Omar ibn Said to allow students to gain important context and depth regarding the figure and the performance.

RELS 120 course

We were also excited to offer classes on other vitally relevant topics and conceptions of justice and wellbeing. These included courses taught by visiting faculty. Prof. Kim Diaz, who is working on a PhD at the University of California Riverside, offered “” in the Fall. During the semester, students developed research projects and had the opportunity to learn more by engaging with LA. During October, students visited Olvera Street during the week of Dia de los Muertos and respectfully observed real-life examples of religion and liberation centered around death (photos provided by students). On the last day of class, RELS/LLAS 228 students presented their original research projects with visual aids. We also celebrated the end of the semester with burritos from a local favorite, Delia's. 

Prof. Kirsten Boles, a PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University, offered the exciting new course on gender and sexuality across religions and time, “.” This course was connected to her own research on Islam and gender in the U.S., and also engaged with a variety of case studies including Judeo-Christian reinterpretations of Genesis to make room for same-sex marriage; gender role mixing in Tantric Hindu ritual; and, Native American postcolonial approaches to HIV within the “two-spirit” community. 

We were also delighted to welcome Prof. Ilan Benattar to offer courses on modern Judaism. His courses, “” and “,” provided modern, global perspectives about Jewish histories and cultures. Professor Benattar is about to complete his PhD at NYU on Ottoman Jewish intellectual history.

RELS speakers 22-23

We also hosted a number of amazing scholars to the department for talks related to their latest research, including  who discussed “guts” in Afro-Diasporic and Latin American religions; , who presented research from her fieldwork on spirit possession in modern socialist China as a continuing site of community; and Sue D. Porter, Founding Executive Director of who spoke to our students about her work with terminally ill people availing themselves of Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act.

Professor Candace Mixon

Finally, this year we bid farewell and offer our huge thanks to our brilliant colleague, Prof. Candace Mixon, who has taught amazing courses on Islam, material culture, art, and gender for the past three years. Prof. Mixon is moving to Portland to take up a position at Reed College. Congratulations Prof. Mixon! Prof. Mixon has worked tirelessly to provide students with amazing learning opportunities – from her initiative to develop her Introduction to Islam course around Omar and to take students to see the opera, as discussed above;

Professor Mixon class

through to amazing field trips to the Getty, LACMA, and many other important sites in LA which allowed students unparalleled opportunities for engagement with religious material culture and art; through to her innovative class activities, pictured here, inspired by her dynamic research on Islamic material culture and gender. Prof. Mixon, and her wonderful dog Jelly, have been deeply valued members of the department during a period of unprecedented challenges brought by the pandemic, and we wish them all the best! 

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