In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book
The 2026 November Annual Meeting in Denver, CO: Friday, November 20 - Tuesday, November 24. All times are listed in Mountain Time Zone. For more information about the November Annual Meeting, co-hosted with the Society of Biblical Literature, click here.
Please note that this is the preliminary schedule and is subject to change. We anticipate a mostly final schedule in mid-August. If you have any questions, please contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org. For Other Events, your event is not confirmed until you received notification from AAR staff.
This session highlights recent scholarship in the study of Islam, gender, and women through an interactive, small-group format. Presenters will be discussing works by Mahjabeen Dhala, Aziza Shanazarova, Zeynep K. Korkman, and Deanna Ferree Womack. Attendees will have access to slides/handouts in advance in order to select the table discussing the work of their choice for an in-depth conversation. The session will conclude with brief reports from each facilitator to the full audience. Business meeting to follow.
The occurrence of new revelations and “bibles” in nineteenth-century America—which opened up new spiritual worlds on a grand scale—remains a perennial topic of fascination for students and scholars of American history, but these have rarely been studied in relation to each other. This panel features a selection of authors from an upcoming volume that seeks to explore new revelations and scriptural production across ethnic and linguistic lines. While by no means exhaustive of the incredibly prolific production that characterized this period, the contributors give sustained, comparative, and theoretical analysis to a wide range of newly created or “discovered” scriptures. The authors take inspiration from relational models that avoid essentializing scripture as an inherently special type of text as opposed to one given this status by a community of believers but also strongly ground their analysis within the cultural context of the nineteenth-century United States and Protestant-derived scriptural practices.
Papers
This paper reconsiders nineteenth‑century American scripturalization by shifting analytical attention from social relations and interpretive practices to scriptures as textual objects that work to support their own authority. While scholars have rightly emphasized scripturalization as a relational, metadiscursive process, this emphasis risks underestimating the work scriptural texts do for themselves at the level of form, content, and presentation. I argue these texts share a conceited self‑reference, explicitly instructing readers how they should be read, studied, cited, or prayed over. These moments of self‑reference allow texts to perform authority they do not yet possess and to obscure their own contingency. I further suggest that nineteenth‑century scriptural creativity was shaped not only by the Bible and post‑Revolutionary social disruption, but also by the American founding documents. Attending to scriptures as objects clarifies both why nineteenth‑century America proved so fertile a site for new scriptures and how textual characteristics contribute to scriptural authority.
This paper discusses three largely forgotten alternative gospels presented by nineteenth-century American Spiritualists. While Spiritualists often reinterpreted the Bible in unorthodox ways and supplemented it with or subordinated it to spirit communications, these new gospels were intended to supplant the canonical accounts, rationalizing them and making them conform to democratic ideals. All three accounts naturalize Jesus's miracles and fiercely attack priestcraft, authorizing Spiritualist understandings of true religion. These alternative gospels reveal tensions at the heart of Spiritualism and reflect anxieties about biblical historicity, scientific materialism, charismatic authority, and ongoing revelation. Dependent on the canonical gospels even as they sought to displace them, these gospels expose the paradox of an anti-authoritarian religious movement operating within a deeply biblicist culture. Through these neglected works, the paper illuminates the tensions that shaped Spiritualist engagements with scripture and, more broadly, the contested place of the Bible in nineteenth-century American religious life.
The Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) people, along with many other Native American nations, faced a genocidal removal in the early nineteenth century from their homelands in Illinois. Among the most important Kiikaapoi leaders of this period was Kenekuk, widely known as the Kickapoo Prophet, who long resisted removal but ultimately moved west to help his people rebuild their lives on a new reservation in Kansas. As a part of his ministry, Kenekuk carved wooden prayer sticks using Algonquian pictographic symbols to guide the prayers of his community. Kenekuk’s followers told outsiders that these prayer sticks were their Bible. Kenekuk himself taught that, although the “White Man’s Bible” was a holy book, his people had no need of it because God had given them their own instructions on how to live. His story offers new insights into scriptural practices in nineteenth-century North America, helping us see alternative forms of scripturalization and the imperial contexts in which they emerged.
Normativity, Biopolitics, and the Dangerous Individual across narrative epistemology and the biopolitics of migration, colonialism, and beyond.
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This essay follows the historical and ideological veins of U.S. biopolitical violence against Mexican bodies, drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics and the legacy of Malthusianism. I analyze how nineteenth-century figures like Josiah Strong fused racist pseudoscience, religious rhetoric, and populationist discourse to legitimize colonial expansion, which necessitated the disciplining of racialized bodies. These frameworks persist in contemporary practices, such as the forced sterilization of Mexican women in 1960s Los Angeles and the ongoing War on Drugs, which disproportionately harms Mexican and Latinx communities. Drawing on scholars like Jade S. Sasser and Oswaldo Zavala, the paper argues that U.S. governmental policies continue to be informed by a logic of “survival of the fittest” and Anglo-Saxon exceptionalist theology, constructing Mexican populations as threats. This rhetoric is used to justify state violence as a project of security and progress, ultimately obscuring the ongoing project of extermination.
Foucault argued that fear of the ineluctable criminal was one means through which state power expanded in the late 1800s. This suggests that power works through affect and emotion, but Foucault does not delve into exactly how populations are made to experience fear, or how that fear is channeled towards the criminal. This paper aims to fill that gap through an examination of detective fiction, part of what Foucault called the "literature of criminality" that spreads fear. It focuses on the affective content of Sherlock Holmes stories, demonstrating how both the form and content of Sherlock stories inspired particular forms of fear in audiences, channeled that fear towards criminals, and then, in solving the crime, transmuted fear of the criminal into love of the state. It concludes with a discussion of how religious studies hermeneutics shed light on the operations of power.
Canguilhem, Foucault, and the Concept: A Discursive View of 'Biological Sex' in Trans-exclusive Radical Feminism.
Recognizing the importance of higher education classrooms for shaping future activists, community organizers, engineers, city planners, politicians, and tech entrepreneurs, this round table builds on the theme of counter-extractivist futures with a focus on pedagogy, curricula, and higher education. At this session we will ask five pedagogues with experience teaching topics on or related to energy, extraction, and religion to reflect on the implications of a turn toward critical engagement with religion, energy and extraction in classrooms and university settings broadly. In particular, they will discuss how the insights and theories from this seminar and this transdisciplinary array of fields should be incorporated into religious studies and theology courses; how a refusal of extractivism should change our methods of teaching and mentoring; and how attention to the nexus of energy, extraction, and religion might facilitate broader efforts to rethink and reimagine higher education.
By focusing on children’s resistance and resilience, the panel explores how these values are formed through literature, religious education, community life, and cultural experiences. Instead of viewing resilience as a personal attribute, the session traces how resilience is created through social, religious, and imaginative frameworks, and how children engage in resisting restrictive narratives and constructing new possibilities for themselves and their communities.
Papers
Scholarship on evangelical women has boomed over the past decade, offering insight into the American Christian Right and its politics of gender and sexuality. But a major gap within this sub-field remains: historical analysis of evangelical girlhood(s) and the nuanced power structures therein, especially as separate from a theological or confessional approach. Building on the work of Heather Hendershot, Emily Suzanne Johnson, and Sara Moslener, and utilizing a Foucauldian framework of power, this paper examines Focus on the Family's Brio Magazine and argues that evangelical girls exist at specific nexus of disenfranchisement and unique authority that constitutes them as a particular type of subject in both religious and political discourses. Girlhood is a unique position that cannot be earned nor disposed of; Indeed, it is impossible to fully grasp the trajectory of contemporary evangelicalism without understanding the role that teenage girls play in the evangelical imagination and American political realities.
"The child" as constructed by the Early Church and inherited via colonization by the West is not, in fact, a child at all. A reflection and manifestation of adult cultural and spiritual anxiety, the child in Christian political discourse has often served as a tool for the consolidation of power as opposed to furthering the interests of concrete children themselves. While attempting to attenuate the impacts of such instrumentalization through positive discourse attending to children as actual persons is of certain value, this paper proposes that the greatest good might be done by removing children from political rhetoric altogether. Children, and indeed all those whom their lives touch, would be better served by encouraging Christian communities to resist their urges to consolidate power in moments of anxiety and lean into the faith they proclaim they possess.
This paper explores the ways that Unitarian-Transcendentalist and social reformer Caroline Wells Healey Dall, in her children’s book series Patty Gray’s Journey, broadly, and its second book, specifically, translated slavery, the Civil War, and the aftermath of both for young readers. Her insistence that children, especially white, Northern children, must know what slavery was and what war was and what both left behind is a reflection of her belief that resilience is forged through knowledge—a belief rooted directly in her Unitarian and Transcendentalist principles. When, Dall prompts us to ask, does the privilege of childhood innocence give way for real-worldly resilience?
This session explores religious encounters with experiences of precarity, scarcity, and survival in Asian cities. Papers include an engagement with an art installation as a representation of the precarity of garland craftspeople of Bangkok, an examination of Mumbai as a case study of religious pluralism as a highly contested, continuous process, and a theological reading of the relationship between finance-dominated capitalism and the built environment in Seoul.
Papers
In contemporary Bangkok, flowers are instrumental to religious life. Buddhists daily offer fresh garlands to temples to accrue merit and to ask deities for blessings. But over the past fifty years, the craftspeople who make these garlands have been forcibly removed from the city, deemed an aesthetic “blight” to the modern landscape. What is the future of these workers in a city that at once needs them and discards them? I answer this question by analyzing a fresh flower chandelier installation created by my interlocutor, a queer Thai flower artist, which premiered in 2025 at Singapore’s international art fair. Lowering the chandelier to the ground, the garlands on the bottom break, providing a soft bed for the more expensive garlands; lower-class workers are breaking under the weight of class inequality. The future is not hopeless. Through developing more intimate relationships with flowers, Bangkokians can cultivate greater movements of class solidarity.
This study interrogates the assumption that hyper-diverse global cities naturally achieve religious pluralism. Utilizing a dual methodology of historical analysis and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among scholars, professionals, and faith leaders, the research argues that the realization of Mumbai's unifying civic ideal is a highly contested, continuous process. Rather than a seamless byproduct of demographic proximity, everyday interreligious engagement is actively complicated by spatial segregation, majoritarian political climates, and the lingering trauma of historical ruptures, requiring calculated, spatialized labor to navigate a deeply layered metropolis.
This paper examines the relationship between finance-dominated capitalism and the built environment in Seoul, South Korea, by analyzing two distinct urban spaces: the city’s slums, known as moon villages (dal-dongnae), and high-rise apartments. During rapid industrialization, war refugees, rural migrants, and evicted residents settled on Seoul’s peripheries, forming what are known as “moon villages (dal-dongnae).” The term dal-dongnae conjures an image of a village built on a hill, as if it might touch the moon in the night sky. Dal-dongnae is not merely illegal housing; they are structural products that emerge when marginalized groups, excluded from housing policies and land markets, have no alternatives. This paper explores how Seoul’s cultural narratives portray class spatialization, progressing from “moon villages” to “apartments” to “penthouses,” highlighting how residential segregation shapes perceptions of class. Ultimately, as moon villages are demolished, a question arises: “How can Christian theology preserve collective memory, community, and housing rights?”
This session debuts the Publicly Engaged Religion Mapping Project Website, which includes a database for public scholarship projects on religion, methodological and analytical recommendations, and relevant funding sources. The website aims to generate resources and information about publicly engaged religious scholarship to foster a network of invested scholars, practitioners, and communities. The project is a collaboration of AAR, ACLS, the Institute for Diversity and Civic Life, and funded through the Henry Luce Foundation.
Where can religious studies scholars fit in the context of a half century long shift towards a career-minded neoliberal university? How can the skills cultivated in the study of religion contribute meaningfully to the future of the liberal arts when religious studies departments are being cut? This roundtable offers reflections on one example of a public R1 university where religious studies scholars have been central to the implementation of a new advising model integrating academic advising with liberal arts classroom teaching. Each scholar will reflect briefly upon how our disciplinary training produces an academic toolbox that allows us to perform the kind of “musical listening” and interdisciplinary pedagogy that are the hallmarks of academic advising and the first-year experience. Additionally, we will touch upon how the theoretical underpinnings, methods, and conversations in religious studies have prepared us to implement a transformative academic experience that affects thousands of undergraduate students annually.
Where can religious studies scholars fit in the context of a half century long shift towards a career-minded neoliberal university? How can the skills cultivated in the study of religion contribute meaningfully to the future of the liberal arts when religious studies departments are being cut? This roundtable offers reflections on one example of a public R1 university where religious studies scholars have been central to the implementation of a new advising model integrating academic advising with liberal arts classroom teaching. Each scholar will reflect briefly upon how our disciplinary training produces an academic toolbox that allows us to perform the kind of “musical listening” and interdisciplinary pedagogy that are the hallmarks of academic advising and the first-year experience. Additionally, we will touch upon how the theoretical underpinnings, methods, and conversations in religious studies have prepared us to implement a transformative academic experience that affects thousands of undergraduate students annually.
This session, planned in cooperation with the Religion and Social Conflicts Unit, will look at various responses to violence as interpreted by Jewish proponents of non-violence, Christian Zionists in South Korea, and Christian and Qur’anic theologians
Papers
In May 2025, the Korea-Israel Bible Institute, one of the oldest Christian Zionist groups in South Korea, inaugurated the Holocaust Museum in Paju, a border city next to North Korea. The city is marked by Korea’s collective trauma from Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and the division of North and South Korea. This paper investigates the theo-political objectives of South Korea's Holocaust Museum—the first such museum opened in Asia outside Israel: to commemorate Jewish suffering as exemplified by the Nazi genocide of six million Jews; to combat antisemitism globally; and to honor the Jewish sacrifices made for South Koreans during the Korean War. This analysis shows how the Holocaust Museum of Korea serves to localize Christian Zionism and disseminate its theo-political visions for the future, reflecting a complex interplay of religious and political narratives with historical remembrance.
Taking its cue from Edward Said’s essay, “Permission to Narrate,” this paper seeks to understand how the power of narrative, and the power to narrate, have impacted Palestinians in Gaza. It situates the violence in Gaza within an international security paradigm, demonstrating how the construction of the “terrorist” as an enemy-Other enables discursive and narrative strategies that reinforce binaries and serve as moral cover for political violence. Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac’s 2023 sermon “Christ in the Rubble” and the critical responses it elicited provide a valuable case study for deconstructing the innocent versus guilty binary by examining Jesus the (innocent) Christ child and Jesus the (guilty) insurrectionist. Read alongside the work of James H. Cone and Richard A. Horsley, I argue that decolonial and liberation theologies offer resources to deconstruct and resist these authoritarian doctrines of international security.
