SPEAKERS

Todd Weir - University of Groningen

Abstract

Forthcoming

Bio

Todd H. Weir is Professor of History of Christianity and Modern Culture in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen. Prior to arriving in the Netherlands, he taught at Queen’s University Belfast for nine years. He is the author of Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge, 2014) which won Jacques Barzun Prize for Culture History.

Albert Wu - Academia Sinica

Abstract

The late nineteenth century age of empire was also an age of anti-superstition. From Europe to Asia, America to Africa, states launched campaigns against beliefs and practices they labeled as "superstitious." At the same time, a new ideological apparatus emerged, as liberal reformers throughout the world sought to draw clear boundaries between superstition and religion. This article situates proposals by the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao to eliminate superstition from the Chinese landscape within this global moment. In particular, it explores how Liang belonged to a global "liberal" moment, when liberal reformers sought to strengthen state power as a way to push forward their liberalizing reforms. The article traces the global ideas that Liang drew upon, from Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to Meiji Reformers such as Inoue Enryō. This article also explores the positions of Chinese critics of Liang—Zheng Xiaoyu, for instance—who defended the "superstitious" practices that Liang sought to destroy. Conventionally seen as reactionaries, I show how these defenders of "superstition" sought to draw on a global interest in folklore to defend these practices. Finally, the article considers how these global histories of superstition played a crucial part in underpinning our histories of secularism.      

Bio

Albert Wu is a global historian, focusing particularly on the transnational connections between Germany and China from c. 1800 to the present. He is broadly interested in the histories of imperialism, religion, and medicine. 

Born in the United States, he grew up in Hsinchu, Taiwan. After graduating from high school in Taiwan, he studied history at Columbia University in New York City. After studying German in Berlin, he pursued a doctorate in history at the University of California, Berkeley. Wu received his Ph.D in 2013, and is currently an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. Previously, he taught at the American University of Paris.

Victoria Smolkin - Wesleyan University

Abstract

This essay brings the histories of Soviet atheism and European secularism into conversation by examining how the domestic activities and transnational interactions of two organizations, the Soviet League of Militant Godless (LMG) and the International of Proletarian Freethinkers (IPF), shaped the meaning and history of secularism in Europe. The IPF and the LMG were both born in 1925, out of and into the ideological and political turmoil that followed the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and both mapped onto and were shaped by this complex and ever-shifting political and ideological landscape. Based on archival research across multiple countries and contexts, this essay proposes that this history is necessarily transnational, and that no single nationally-bound perspective can explain the course of the story. Indeed, this story is precisely about the clash of perspectives and perceptions. This essay argues that Soviet atheism played a central role in the formation of secularism’s definitions, political associations, and even the positioning of secularism’s critique. And yet, while Soviet atheism has haunted secularism, its precise role and influence has continued to be obscure. It has remained a distant specter—often invoked, but rarely engaged. Looking at European secularism through the lens of Soviet atheism offers insights into how the IPF and LMG’s engagements with religion and atheism revised secularism’s categories and reconfigured its national and global alliances. It also allows us to think through the relationship between secularism and atheism as worldview and political projects.

Bio

Victoria Smolkin, associate professor of history, joined Wesleyan’s faculty in 2010. A scholar of Communism, the Cold War, as well as atheism and religion in Russia and the former Soviet Union, history professor Victoria Smolkin's expertise also covers religious politics and secularism, the Soviet space program, and East European and Eurasian studies. She holds a BA in European Literature and History from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MA and PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Smolkin's work has been supported by various fellowships and grants, including Princeton University’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, the Social Science Research Council, the Newcombe Fellowship in Religion and Ethics, the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center. At Wesleyan, she was awarded the Carol A. Baker ’81 Memorial Prize for excellence in teaching and research, and Fellowships from the College of the Environment, the Center for Humanities, and the History Department's Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs First Semester Research Fellowship. She has been invited to speak at lectures, seminars, and various symposia throughout the world about her studies of Communism, atheism, religion and ideology in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Her first book, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (2018), was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution of Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences, and the Russian translation was long listed for the Alexander Patigosky Literary Prize. She is currently at work on two projects: “The Wall of Memory: Ukraine and the Impossibility of History,” and "The World of Tomorrow: Communism, Cosmism, and the Fate of Utopia."

Eric Gregory - Princeton University

Abstract

The coincident rise of political theology and secular studies across disparate disciplines is a remarkable feature of the contemporary academy.  They name contested and diverse inquiries that tack between the historical and the normative in ways that provincialize and challenge central features of Western liberalism once funded by a defunct secularization thesis.  As scholarly fields, while in flux and frequently at transgressive cross purposes, they share texts and critical methodologies that disturb an often veiled yet assumed liberal (white) Protestant binary opposition between the religious and secular across various domains.  This paper analyzes their possible constructive relationship by focusing on the politics and political implications of such efforts that destabilize conventional liberalism, especially for those who “want to have our secular cake and eat it too” (Jakobsen & Pellegrini, Secularisms, 28).  I do so by pairing two recent challenges to each field from within as well as broader streams of the humanities: calls to move “beyond critique” and work in political theory that, in part responsive to both fields, seeks to decouple the liberal tradition from its own inadequate secularizing narratives to reclaim its ethical commitments amidst radical pluralism and a reconfigured secularity.

Bio

Eric Gregory joined the Princeton faculty in 2001, and was promoted to Professor in 2009. He is the author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and articles in a variety of edited volumes and journals, including the Journal of Religious Ethics, Modern Theology, Studies in Christian Ethics, and Augustinian Studies. His interests include religious and philosophical ethics, theology, political theory, law and religion, and the role of religion in public life. In 2007 he was awarded Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. A graduate of Harvard College, he earned an M.Phil. and Diploma in Theology from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and his doctorate in Religious Studies from Yale University. He has received fellowships from the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Tikvah Center for Law & Jewish Civilization at New York University School of Law. Among his current projects is a book tentatively titled, The In-Gathering of Strangers: Global Justice and Political Theology, which examines secular and religious perspectives on global justice. Former Chair of the Humanities Council at Princeton, he also serves on the the editorial board of the Journal of Religious Ethics and sits with the executive committee of the University Center for Human Values.

Lucia Ruth Hulsether - Skidmore College

Abstract

Forthcoming

Bio

Lucia Ruth Hulsether is a theorist of religion, culture, and politics in the Americas and an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College. Hercore areas of study and teaching include capitalism and labor, histories of social movements, feminist theory, popular culture and media, and other topics in contemporary cultural critique.

Her first book, Capitalist Humanitarianism, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. She is currently working on two projects: one on the gendered history of youth civic engagement programs and another on the cultures of competitive college debate. Hulsether's research has appeared in journals like Public Culture, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Journal of Religion and American Culture. She also have written popular pieces for Jacobin, Religion and Politics, and Immanent Frame.

Alongside her undergraduate mentor Tina Pippin, she co-hosts Nothing Never Happens: A Radical Pedagogy Podcast. Hultheser received her PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University in 2020. She also holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard and a BA from Agnes Scott College.

Cemil Aydin - University of North Carolina

Abstract

Forthcoming 

Bio

Cemil Aydin is professor of international/global history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Department of History. He studied at Boğaziçi University, İstanbul University, and the University of Tokyo before receiving his Ph.D. degree at Harvard University in 2002. He was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2002-2024), and a Mellon Foundation post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies (2007-2008).

Cemil Aydin’s publications include his book on the Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (Columbia University Press, 2007) and The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, Spring 2017). His writings on the political history of the world in the long 19th century was published from Harvard University Press in 2018 as part of an edited volume An Emerging Modern World: 1750–1870 (2018) He currently serves as the co-editor of Columbia University Press book series on International and Global History, and editorial board member of Modern Intellectual History journal.

K. Healan Gaston - Harvard University

Abstract

This paper explores the weaponization of “secularism” in contemporary American politics. It argues that commonplace distinctions between the “anti-religious secularism” of the French case and the “pro-religious secularism” of the American case, while illuminating, offer us very little perspective on the role of “secularism talk” in current events such as the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. On the strength of these observations, I invite scholars and public commentators to rethink their assumptions about who has the power to use secularism as a weapon and to begin thinking more seriously about the workings of secularism as a discourse. I have explored the need for this in several published works, and I devote the first part of this paper to drawing these insights together. I then show how my findings help us understand two of the most striking developments in contemporary United States’ politics: the rightward turn of religious freedom and the resurgence of white Christian nationalism.

Bio

K. Healan Gaston is Lecturer on American Religious History and Ethics at Harvard Divinity School for 2021–22. She is the author of Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2019), the first comprehensive study of “Judeo-Christian” constructions of American democracy and national identity. She is currently writing a second book—part history and part ethics—that circles outward from a fascinating intellectual relationship between two leading mid-twentieth-century thinkers who also happened to be brothers: the Christian ethicist and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr and his younger brother, the theologian and ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr. Her work on this project builds on a remarkable set of previously unknown letters between the Niebuhr brothers that Gaston discovered in the HDS archives in 2008. A former president of the Niebuhr Society, Gaston also served as a senior advisor to the filmmaker Martin Doblmeier on his recent documentary Reinhold Niebuhr: An American Conscience. Before coming to HDS, she taught in Harvard’s Social Studies and Freshman Seminar programs. A specialist in the history of religious thought, ethics, and theology, Gaston teaches courses on religion’s roles in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of the United States, focusing especially on how that history speaks to the ethical dilemmas we face in a diverse society. Her interests include religious pluralism, secularism and secularization, religion and the law, the ethno-religious and religio-racial dimensions of American experience, interfaith religions, and religion's changing place in an increasingly global, corporate, and digital age.

Justine Quijada - Wesleyan University

Abstract

Forthcoming

Bio

Justine Quijada is Associate Professor in the  Department of Religion, affiliated member of the Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program. She has an MA in Anthropology from Columbia University and a BA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Before joining the faculty at Wesleyan, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Religious Diversity at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany.

Her research focuses on post-Soviet religious practice in Buryatia, indigenous urban shamanism, New Age neo-shamanism, secularism and ritual.  She is currently working on a book about post-Soviet shamanism in Ulan-Ude, Buryatia.

Amy Alemu - Scripps College

Abstract

Forthcoming

Bio

Amsele (Amy) Alemu is assistant professor in the Department of History at Scripps College. She received her PhD from the Department of African-American Studies at Harvard University in 2021. Her interests include Black transnationalism, the history of political thought, and integrative approaches to African and African-American Studies.

Susanna Ferguson - Smith College

Abstract

A familiar complaint about forms of thought that become generalizable as "theory" (be it literary, social, or political) is that they improperly universalize histories and experiences that are actually particular to the Christian West (Said 1982, Chakrabarty 2007). Perhaps the opposite might be said for recent debates in studies of the secular. Since the publication of Talal Asad’s influential Formations of the Secular (2003), Muslim communities in Egypt have served as a key context for generating critiques of secularity (as a social imaginary) and secularism (as a political project of governance), and for illustrating alternative forms of life (Asad 2003, Mahmood 2005, Hirshkind 2006, Agrama 2012). Scholars of Europe, in turn, have looked to Europe’s Muslim immigrants to provincialize supposedly-universal characteristics of European secularity (Ewing 2008, Mahmood 2009, Jouili 2015, Scott 2017). Many of these works have placed women and gender at the heart of their attempts to situate Muslims, and/or a diachronic “Islamic tradition,” as take-off points for parochializing the secular in the West. Within this literature, investigations of embodied practice and self-formation (Mahmood 2005, Hirschkind 2006, Deeb 2011, Rock-Singer 2018, 2022) and of the law (Asad 2003, Agrama 2012, Fahmy 2018) have proven particularly helpful to projects of provincialization and critique.

This essay approaches questions about gender and secularism not through the law or the body, but through another of the nineteenth century’s ascendant sites of epistemological authority: the changing terrain of science, or ‘ilm in Arabic. Strangely, the field of secularism studies has not tended to engage the category of science (Schaefer, 2022). In the Arab world, historians of science have examined men’s discussions to chart how ʿilm, once a broad category akin to “knowledge” in English, came to include a neo-Baconian understanding of the modern English “science” (Elshakry 2010, 2015; Yalçinkaya 2015). Here, by contrast, I turn to Arabic science textbooks—a domain that included women as well as men, Christians as well as Muslims—to trace articulations of gender and God in a literate community shaped by situated projects of state-building, translation, and evangelism. Many nineteenth-century Arabic science textbooks in Ottoman lands were produced under the aegis of the Syrian Protestant Mission, and many of them were taught to girls. As the essay traces gender and God through the changing terrain of
science/‘ilm, it asks: what might a story of sex and secularism look like in a place where
intellectual culture and social life was forged by both Christians and Muslims? And, what might an analysis of Arabic-language debates about gender and God look like if it were released from the duties of ‘provincializing’ European secularity?

Bio

Susanna Ferguson is a historian of women, gender, and political thought in the  Middle East. Her research focuses on how questions about women, gender and sex shaped political imaginaries across national boundaries in the 19th- and 20-century Arab world.

Ferguson is currently working on a book manuscript titled Formative Years: Gender, Education, and Democracy in the Arab East, 1860-1939. The book is a feminist conceptual history of upbringing (tarbiya) as it was articulated by intellectuals writing in Arabic between the last decades of the Ottoman Empire and the outbreak of the second World War. It focuses on women writers raised in Beirut and Mount Lebanon who moved to Cairo around 1900 to become preeminent theorists of tarbiya, an old Arabic word for cultivation and upbringing that came in the 19th century to refer to new structures of formal schooling, new pedagogies and the female labor of childrearing, moral cultivation and subject formation in the home. Through these writers and others, the concept of tarbiya moved across gender, geography and sect to enable new political imaginaries: upbringing became the way to shape men and women fit for representative politics and new class formations, to produce an Arab world capable of facing rising European power, and to refashion various intellectual traditions for a new age.

Ferguson has published on questions of gender, education and women’s activism in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and the Arab Studies Journal. She is a longtime host, former editor-in-chief and now associate producer at the Ottoman History Podcast, where she also co-curates the series on “Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World.” She is currently working on new research on gender and science pedagogy in 19th-century Beirut and on the history of sexual science in Arabic.