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• NU Graduate School

Contemporary Religons

The program in Contemporary Religions at Northwestern offers students the opportunity to study religious practices, figures, and issues in current global circumstances, with attention to the theoretical traditions that have developed for understanding religion and religions today.
 
Students entering the program in contemporary religion are asked, first, to familiarize themselves with the complex theoretical inheritances, in religious studies and in the social sciences, for understanding the modern world and modern religions.  They will survey the theoretical and historiographical traditions that contribute to how we think about “contemporary religions” and take a broad look at developments in religion around the world today. Such developments may include religion in Eastern Europe after 1989; religion and changing information and communication technologies; the explosion of spirit-present idioms around the world (in the proliferation of urban shrines to sacred figures across Asia, for example, or the global boom in Pentecostalism); religious idioms at the intersection of peoples (either in violence or in peace-making); religion and the neoliberal economy (in China, for instance). Students will also take a seminar on field methods in religious studies, to prepare them for dissertation research.
 
Incoming students in contemporary religions work with an adviser to develop a program for their particular interests, drawing on faculty and resources in Religion and in other departments and programs at Northwestern. Students may focus on (a) a particular region of the world; (b) on a theoretical issue of significance in understanding contemporary religions (e.g., the argument about modernity, or secularization); (c) or on a religious culture in its contemporary expression (global Christianity, for instance, or contemporary African Islam). In consultation with their advisers, students will determine the necessary languages for their program and the courses they might take outside the department in other disciplines.

All students in the program in contemporary religions will take a qualifying examination in theories of modern religion, in addition to the general examination in the study of religion required of all graduate students in the department. In addition, they will take two other examinations, developed in consultation with their advisers, one of which is to be broadly related to their plans for their dissertation.
 
Core faculty:  George Bond, Robert Orsi, Rüdiger Seesemann, Sarah Taylor, M. Sani Umar
Support faculty: Christine Helmer, Cristina Traina, Barry Wimpfheimer, Laurie Zoloth