Courses

Instructor of Record

Fall 2024 

In Religion and Popular Culture we will analyze fashion, sci-fi, music videos, sports, TikTok trends, cosplay, advertisements, celebrities, video games, Disney, memes, digital rituals, and more. By exploring a wide variety of examples from different times, places, and religious traditions, we will consider how popular culture works and what makes it so appealing, seductive, and controversial. Throughout the course, we will also consider how popular culture and religion intersect with nationalism, capitalism, race, gender, and sexuality.

Read the course reviews. 

Student Teacher

Spring 2024

Taught by Dr. Jennifer Knust

Introduction to leading themes and concepts in the study of religions as practiced by human persons and communities across time and place. 

This course considers the questions:

• What is religion?

• What is Religious?

• How are people religious? 

Student Teacher

Spring 2025

Taught by Dr. Andrew Coates

This course presents a history of religions in the United States from the colonial era to the present. The course uses texts such as sermons, tracts, letters, memoirs, fiction, and poetry as evidence of historical change. It also engages religious history through material and visual evidence such as architecture, images, shrines, monuments, photographs, art, and sacred spaces.

Teaching Assistant

Spring 2023 & Spring 2024

Taught by Dr. Larissa Carneiro

This course explores the many ways in which sports converge with (and diverge from) religion. In the United States, the relationship between religion and sport touches the core issues of the separation between state and religion, the protection of religious minorities, and the quest for religious freedom. By investigating the many ways in which religion intersects with sport, this course seeks to understand what religion is, why both sporting and religious events have so much appeal, and what the impact of this intersection in public and political life may be.

Teaching Assistant

Fall 2022 & Spring 2025

Taught by Dr. Andrew Coates

The interactions between religion and film consist of more than what appears on a movie screen. This class will examine how film has served as a medium of religious exploration, mythmaking, and world-building. We will also think about the medium of film as a type of technology that has served a variety of interesting roles in religious communities: as a tool of good or evil, as an audio-visual technology for practicing religion, and as a creator of new religious possibilities. We will think about what films do, how films work, and how religious audiences have engaged specific films—for better and for worse.

Teaching Assistant

Fall 2023

Taught by Dr. Joseph Winters

This course examines how cinema both constructs and reproduces anti-black racism and how cinema works to liberate blackness from the strictures of racial domination. We will watch films from the past three decades that provide an opportunity to interrogate the relationship between race, gender, and sexuality. These films will also enable us to think about how cinema introduces unconventional notions of the sacred, a process that involves affect, desire, and imagination.