Theology and Religious Reflection Unit
The Theology and Religious Reflection unit seeks paper and panel proposals on the following topics, as well as on topics related to the unit’s general remit.
- Proposals and panels that consider the significance of geography, space, and place in theology and/or religion.
- Proposals and panels dealing with satanic panics (e.g., Conjuring, Dungeons and Dragons)
- Proposals that, in connection with this year’s presidential theme, look at how futurity configures and reconfigures notions of spirit and/or the human.
- Proposals centering on activism and confrontations with power in academia, and the ways that these confrontations witness to possible futures.
"Haunting Future/s," for a potential panel co-sponsored by the Religion, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism Unit and Theology and Religious Reflection Unit:
- In response to this year’s presidential theme, we invite papers that investigate questions of futurity in theological and colonial discourses on haunting, spectrality, and ghostliness. Topics can include but are not limited to:
- Political messianism
- The “post” of postcolonialism
- “Vanishing races”
- (Post-)Colonial Melancholia
- Fascism and utopia in the settler colony (re: Jameson?)
- Theology and horror
- Theologies of spectral media
- Necropolitics and biopolitics
- Spectrality and the archive
- Imperial boomerangs
- "Survivance"
- Ancestral presences and interventions
For a potential co-sponsored panel between Lesbian-Feminisms and Religion Unit, Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit, and Theology and Religious Reflection Unit:
A panel engaging Wendy Mallette’s Lesbian Feminist Killjoys: Sin, Queer Negativity, and Inherited Guilt (NYU Press, 2026). This is a largely pre-arranged author-meets-respondents session, but we are interested in including additional scholars interested in historical and/or theological approaches to queer, lesbian, feminist, and trans studies, Christian discourse on sin, and American religious cultures. Please email Siobhan Kelly (smk@ku.edu) if you would like to be considered as a panelist.
The Theology and Religious Reflection Unit is committed to fostering broad, interdisciplinary conversations in the study of religion and theology. We aim to cultivate a site of intersection and engagement for scholars working in various religious contexts who also have interests in the wider aspects of mutual interest in our field (theological, theoretical, methodological, political, ethical). Our Unit promotes constructive work that typically includes an emphasis on critical engagement as well as conceptual and social transformation.