Department of Religious Studies
HomeUndergraduateGraduateNews and EventsFaculty and StaffResources

Conference Overview

 

 Religion and Identity

Northwestern University, Department of Religion

Graduate Conference

April 24-25, 2009

 

The Religion Department of Northwestern University will be hosting its first-ever graduate conference on Religion and Identity on the Northwestern campus in Evanston, Illinois on April 24-25, 2009.

Over the past few years, weighty issues of religious identity have become more visible in the international and political landscape. Whether self-defined or unwillingly imposed, religious identity serves to situate people within groups and cultures, but in this respect it can become contested ground of inclusion and exclusion.  Likewise, religious dissent and conversion are entwined with questions of the rupture or redefinition of identity. We even see a growing phenomenon of people who embrace multiple religious identities, through pluralistic convictions as well as growing number of religiously-diverse families and social networks.  But religious identity is more than just a matter of classifications.  It is a means for personal and political assertion of moral and ethical convictions, with consequences for issues of gender, sexuality, medicine, treatment of animals, and human rights. 

All of these questions deserve thorough exploration in an interdisciplinary setting, and thus the Religion Department invites students and faculty from across the humanities and social sciences. Broadly conceived, “identity,” with all of its fluidities, polarities, and (in)stabilities, offers a particularly rich point of discussion for graduate students who approach religion from a number of different fields, including philosophy, anthropology, history, gender studies, political science, sociology, and psychology.

This conference is sponsored by:

The Graduate School Professional Development Grant, Northwestern University

The Midwest Region of the American Academy of Religion (AAR)

Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University

Department of Religion, Northwestern University

Department of History, Northwestern University

Department of English, Northwestern University

The Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies, Northwestern University

Dept. of Communication Studies: Rhetoric and Public Culture, Northwestern University

The Program of Asian and Middle East Studies (AMES), Northwestern University