The Politics of Eschatology and Global Movements
Friday, May 1st 2-5:30
CUNY Graduate Center
Room 5307
Ruth Marshall (University of Toronto), “Spiritual Warfare in the End Times: Evangelical Politics of Truth and Time”
Nerina Rustomji (St. John’s University), “The Houri Code: Online Jihadi and Feminist Interpretations on the Heavenly Virgins of Islamic Paradise”
Lynn R. Huber (Elon University), “Envisioning the End: Eschatology as Social-Political Critique in John’s Apocalypse”
Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “The Politics of the ‘Modern’/Middle-Class Body: Astrological Afflictions and Hindu Eschatologies”
Vincent Crapanzano (CUNY Graduate Center) as respondent
For questions, please contact us at studyofreligion@gc.cuny.edu
Panelists’ bios:
Ruth Marshall is Associate Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (U. Chicago Press, 2009) and numerous scholarly articles on the political implications of Pentecostalism and postcolonial politics in West Africa. She’s interested in the contemporary nexus between religion and politics and the challenge of clearing an analytical space in which the political productivity of religious discourse and practice may be analyzed non-reductively. Her current major research projects investigate prayer as a form of political praxis (SSRC), and study the political implications of the evangelization of Europe and North America by Pentecostals from the Global South (SSHRC). In 2013-14 she was a Chancellor Jackman Fellow in the Humanities at the U of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute where she began work on a new book which examines the renewed ethico-political force of religious language in the public sphere and the political challenge that global revivalism poses to democratic forms of life.
Nerina Rustomji specializes in the intellectual and cultural formation of Islamic societies and the Middle East, and she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at St. John’s University (Queens, New York). Her book, The Garden and the Fire: Heaven and Hell in Islamic Culture (Columbia University Press, 2009), narrates a history of heaven and hell in Islamic texts, material cultures, and book arts from the seventh century C.E. She is currently completing a book entitled Beauty of the Houri: Heavenly Virgins, Earthly Jihad, and the Feminine Models of Islam, which narrates the Atlantic and Islamic histories of one of the most sensational tropes about Islam – houris or pure female companions in Islamic Paradise.
Lynn R. Huber is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Religious Studies Department at Elon University in Elon, NC. She teaches in the fields of New Testament, Second Temple Judaism, and Early Christianity, while her scholarly work revolves around the Book of Revelation–both in its historical context and as appropriated by subsequent interpreters, apocalyptic metaphor, and gender and sexuality in the ancient world. Completing her Ph.D at Emory University in 2004, Huber’s dissertation was published as a book titled “Like a Bride Adorned”: Reading Metaphor in John’s Apocalypse in 2007. Her more recent book, published in 2013 by Bloomsbury, is Thinking and Seeing with Women in Revelation. In this work Huber explores the ways in which the conceptual domains at work in Revelation’s gendered imagery, especially its bridal imagery, are redeployed by visionary authors in subsequent historical settings, including late-medieval Europe and the modern South-Eastern United States. Other published works by Huber explore ways in which Revelation’s gendered imagery serves as part of the text’s critique of the Roman Empire, including its social expectations. Huber is currently co-writing a feminist commentary on the Book of Revelation and beginning to write about the text’s engagement with popular Roman discourses about masculinity.
Amy L. Allocco is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Elon University. She is the 2012 recipient of the Elon College of Arts and Science’s Excellence in Teaching Award and previously held the University’s Distinguished Emerging Scholar professorship in Religious Studies. Allocco earned her PhD from Emory University and also holds degrees from Harvard Divinity School and Colgate University. Her research focuses on vernacular Hinduism, especially contemporary Hindu ritual traditions and women’s religious practices in Tamil Nadu, South India, where she has been studying and conducting fieldwork for 20 years. Trained both as an ethnographer of South Asian religions and in approaches to Hindu textual traditions, Allocco specializes in performance and ritual studies as well as gender and religion. She is completing her first book, which analyzes contemporary snake goddess traditions in South India and the repertoire of ritual therapies performed to mitigate nāga dōṣam (snake blemish), a malignant horoscopic condition understood to cause delayed marriage and infertility. Among her most recent publications is a book chapter based on this research titled “Snakes in the Dark Age: Human Action, Karmic Retribution, and the Possibilities for Hindu Animal Ethics” in Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics: Rethinking the Nonhuman (Routledge 2014) and an article in Religions of South Asia (2013). She received The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion’s Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award for an article focused on the narrative strategies and ritual authority of a female Hindu healer published in 2013. In 2014 Allocco guest edited (with James Ponniah) a special issue of Nidan: An International Journal for the Study of Hinduismtitled “‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’: Contemporary Understandings of the Kali Yuga,” to which she also contributed an article. Along with Brian Pennington, she is completing a co-edited volume titled Ritual Innovation in South Asian Religions. Allocco will be on research leave in 2015-2016 and will conduct fieldwork in India with the support of a Fulbright-Nehru Award as well as from a fellowship awarded jointly by the American Institute of Indian Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Vincent Crapanzano is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature, City University of New York. He earned his B.A. from Harvard and his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. He has taught and lectured in major universities in North and South America, Europe, Hong Kong, and South Africa. The subjects of his study and writing are wide ranging, including the epistemology of interpretation, psychoanalysis, ethnopsychiatry, spirit possession, life histories and the articulation of experience, memory, transgression and hope, and literary criticism. Crapanzano has done fieldwork with the Navajo Indians, the Hamadsha (a Moroccan Muslim confraternity), white South Africans during apartheid, Christian fundamentalists and legal conservatives in America, and the Harkis (Algerians who sided with the French during the Algerian War of Independence). Among his numerous books are his recent memoir, Recapitulations (2015); The Harkis: The Wound that Never Heals (2011);Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (2003), The Fifth World of Forster Bennett: Portrait of a Navajo(2003); Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench (2000); Waiting: The Whites of South Africa(1985). His essays have appeared in academic journals as well as such magazines and newspapers as The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Times Literary Supplement.
