Our meetings are open, but a RSVP is required. Columbia University’s COVID guidelines apply to our in-person meetings: https://news.columbia.edu/news/update-covid-19-university-guidance. If you have any concerns or questions, please do not hesitate to write to me (dar2111 [at] columbia.edu).
Details for our meetings in 2024/2025 will be posted as they become available. As in the last years, I expect to schedule both hybrid and ZOOM only events. Hybrid events will be accessible to both ZOOM and in-person participants. The in-person participants will convene in the Faculty House on Columbia’s Morningside campus (64 Morningside Drive, New York, NY 10027; for directions, please click here; for accommodation of access, please see below).
Fall 2024
Tuesday, October 1, 2024, 5 pm (NYC, Faculty House & ZOOM) – Jonathan Peterson (Columbia University), Disfiguring the Divine: Vyāsa’s Body between Polemic and Procession
This talk examines the history of a once-popular procession in which the severed arm of Vyāsa—the storied author of the Mahābhārata—was paraded through villages and cities throughout southern India. As a sacred figure for some, Vyāsa’s desecration provoked ire and occasional violence until 1945, when the Bombay High Court outlawed the practice. The talk focuses on three turning points. The first is an early modern Sanskrit poem titled Praising Vyāsa, Condemning the Apostates (Pāṣaṇḍakhaṇḍanavyāsastotra) written by Vādirāja Tīrtha (c.1550–1610), a popular intellectual, poet, and the first known writer to weigh in on the question of Vyāsa’s arm. The second is a genealogy of analogues of divine dismemberment in the Mahābhārata, Purāṇas, and Śaiva didactic writings. And the third is the circuitous course that Vyāsa’s arm cut through courts in British India. Collectively, these turning points provide not only a genealogy of a religious controversy; they also remind us that figures like Vyāsa belong not to epic antiquity, but to a present in which gods and epic heroes are refigured (or disfigured) as points of political struggle.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024, 5 pm (NYC, ZOOM only) – David Hollenberg (University of Oregon): Reverend Easson’s Burden: A Nineteenth-Century Nusayri Manuscript between Ottoman Reform and an American Missionary’s Enthusiasm
Spring 2025
February 11, 2025, noon (NYC, ZOOM only) – Verena Böll (Independent Scholar, Dresden)
TBA – Johannes Makar (Harvard University)
TBA – TBA
Columbia University encourages persons with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. University Seminar participants with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations may contact the Office of Disability Services at 212.854.2388 or [email protected]. Disability accommodations, including sign-language interpreters, are available on request. Requests for accommodations must be made two weeks in advance.
The official page of the Columbia University Seminar 751 is available at: http://universityseminars.columbia.edu/seminars/religion-and-writing/. For more information about the seminar’s history, please see: https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/islamicbooks/religionwriting/usem751history/. The abstracts of all talks since January 2012 are archived at: https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/islamicbooks/religionwriting/abstracts/
Dagmar A. Riedel, chair
Columbia University
dar2111 [at] columbia.edu
Heidi Hansen, rapporteur
Columbia University
Department of History
heh2135 [at] columbia.edu
First published, 1 February 2012
Last updated, 5 September 2024