In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper reads Li Bai’s poems on Mount Song as a small corpus linking poetic form to the social and institutional life of a sacred mountain. Rather than treating his “Daoism” as personal temperament projected onto scenery, I show how the poems presuppose Songshan as a worked religious terrain: a Central Marchmount shaped by past legends of transcendents, sites of retreat and rare herbs, imperial sacrifice, and abbeys. Four clusters anchor the analysis: poems on Yuan Danqiu that make friendship and visiting a way of locating aspiration; the sweet flag gatherer poem that condenses the Han Wudi legend into a fleeting encounter with a transcendent; a farewell poem that ties imagined residence to herb gathering; and an address to a female Daoist master that builds presence through absence. Together, they show Songshan made visible through acts of visiting, seeking, and naming: where friendship, hagiographic memory, and institutions converge

This paper explores the Ming woman poet Ye Xiaoluan’s (1616–1632) posthumous identity as a Daoist female immortal in three Ming biographies. Apart from certain historical facts about Xiaoluan’s human life, these biographies highlight her family members’ spiritual encounters with Xiaoluan during her various “returns” as a female immortal. The sections on Xiaoluan’s afterlife suggest the possibility of studying these biographies as hagiographies, which will shed light on how a late imperial cultural figure was remembered and immortalized. The paper analyzes how the notions of poetry and space play a significant role in the writers’ construction of Xiaoluan’s Daoist identity. To convince the readers of her Daoist identity, how did the three authors imagine and depict the sacred spaces? How did poetry participate in legitimizing these writers’ claim of Xiaoluan’s new identity as a Daoist immortal? 

This paper develops a method for reading classical Chinese poetry when it appears as quotation on social media and becomes attached to contemporary places. It begins with a 2016 Weibo “#早自习” (“morning self-study”) post that simply quotes Wang Bo’s Tang poem Xun daoguan (“Seeking a Daoist Temple”). Rather than treating this as a purely literary gesture, the paper argues that quoted poems reflect and participate in devotional practices present across contemporary China. Expanding outward to posts about Daoist caves and temples, it shows how social media posts often emerge during travel experiences, religious visits, or heightened emotional states such as nostalgia, fatigue, longing, or serenity. In these contexts, quoted poetry functions as an emotional intensifier, a legitimizing voice, and a form of cultural capital. The paper demonstrates how feeling gathers around caves—imagined as liminal, sheltered zones of sacred depth—illuminating contemporary expressions of popular Daoism

This paper examines how a form of political theology emerges in the interplay between Urdu poetry and its critical traditions. Focusing on a close reading of a nineteenth-century poem by Mirza Asad Allāh Khān Ghalib, composed shortly after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the study explores the poem’s image of Judgement Day as a mahshar-e khayāl, or “a resurrection ground of thought.” The poem moves between solitude and collective assembly to advance two theological insights: that the individual contains internal multitudes of thought (even if inaccessible), and that resurrection transforms forgetfulness into awareness. Reading the poem alongside later commentary, the paper argues that the nineteenth-century Urdu literary culture articulates political theology beyond reformist prose, complicating assumptions about the secular character of Urdu literary criticism. 

This paper draws on my doctoral research on Indo-Islamic music in South Asia to discuss how the hyperlocal travelling cultures of Indo-Islamic music becomes a tool to map the rhizomatic networks of inter-city migration of North Indian Muslims to Bengal in the mid 19th century. The varied consequences of the movement and displacement of Bihari Muslims and its associated socio-political vulnerabilities forms the core of this chapter. Deriving from ethnography conducted in Little Awadh in Calcutta I argue how the Shia liturgies of Hussaini poet Saleha Begum Maqhfi encode the “hijrat” or migration of Bihari Muslim families to Calcutta. Based on literary and textual analysis of exemplary marsiya and nauha composed by Maqhfi, I wish to argue how her Indo-Islamic liturgies honouring Imam Hussain’s valour and benefaction may also add to our understating of the many socio-political and emotional anxieties faced by Bihari “mutwassit” (middle class) Muslims of Little Awadh in Calcutta. 

This paper examines the making and circulation of tāʿziyas in the small towns of Masauli, Biswan, and Mahmudabad in North India to explore how mourning for Imam Husayn becomes embedded in practices of craft, labor, and devotion. While scholarship on Muharram has largely focused on major urban centers such as Lucknow or Hyderabad, this study shifts attention to qasbati contexts where tāʿziyadari is sustained through localized networks of artisans, patrons, and devotees. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and participant observation during Muharram processions, the paper argues that the tāʿziya functions not merely as a symbolic representation of Husayn’s shrine in Karbala but as an intercessory object through which devotees seek closeness to God (Allah).

This paper examines how a form of political theology emerges in the interplay between Urdu poetry and its critical traditions. Focusing on a close reading of a nineteenth-century poem by Mirza Asad Allāh Khān Ghalib, composed shortly after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the study explores the poem’s image of Judgement Day as a mahshar-e khayāl, or “a resurrection ground of thought.” The poem moves between solitude and collective assembly to advance two theological insights: that the individual contains internal multitudes of thought (even if inaccessible), and that resurrection transforms forgetfulness into awareness. Reading the poem alongside later commentary, the paper argues that the nineteenth-century Urdu literary culture articulates political theology beyond reformist prose, complicating assumptions about the secular character of Urdu literary criticism. 

This paper draws on my doctoral research on Indo-Islamic music in South Asia to discuss how the hyperlocal travelling cultures of Indo-Islamic music becomes a tool to map the rhizomatic networks of inter-city migration of North Indian Muslims to Bengal in the mid 19th century. The varied consequences of the movement and displacement of Bihari Muslims and its associated socio-political vulnerabilities forms the core of this chapter. Deriving from ethnography conducted in Little Awadh in Calcutta I argue how the Shia liturgies of Hussaini poet Saleha Begum Maqhfi encode the “hijrat” or migration of Bihari Muslim families to Calcutta. Based on literary and textual analysis of exemplary marsiya and nauha composed by Maqhfi, I wish to argue how her Indo-Islamic liturgies honouring Imam Hussain’s valour and benefaction may also add to our understating of the many socio-political and emotional anxieties faced by Bihari “mutwassit” (middle class) Muslims of Little Awadh in Calcutta. 

This paper examines the making and circulation of tāʿziyas in the small towns of Masauli, Biswan, and Mahmudabad in North India to explore how mourning for Imam Husayn becomes embedded in practices of craft, labor, and devotion. While scholarship on Muharram has largely focused on major urban centers such as Lucknow or Hyderabad, this study shifts attention to qasbati contexts where tāʿziyadari is sustained through localized networks of artisans, patrons, and devotees. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and participant observation during Muharram processions, the paper argues that the tāʿziya functions not merely as a symbolic representation of Husayn’s shrine in Karbala but as an intercessory object through which devotees seek closeness to God (Allah).

At the outset of the 20th century L'Action Francaise and Le Sillon, the former identified with the philosophy of Charles Maurras, the latter with Marc Sangnier, vied for the allegiance of Francophone Catholics more largely and the Catholic hierarchy more particularly. Maurras valued the Church as supporter of order and discipline and increasingly gained its support while over the same period Le Sillon ran afoul of the hierarchy, receiving condemnation in 1910. In the 1920s it was Action Francaise's turn to receive condemnation. The paper focuses on the interrelations of the two movements up to the condemnation of 1910.

This paper examines Adolf von Harnack’s rapid transition from public supporter of Kaiser Wilhelm II to defender of the Weimar Republic, arguing that his particular brand of Lutheran Kulturprotestantismus provided the theological resources to make this political transition in ways unavailable to many of his contemporaries. Situating his case within contemporary theories of religious nationalism (Brubaker, Gorski, Rieffer, Soper and Fetzer, Türkmen), this paper contends that prevailing typologies do not adequately account for how religious-national identities are renegotiated across changes in regime type. Harnack’s career reveals how the Lutheran two-kingdoms inheritance, combined with Kulturprotestantismus’s identification of Christianity with cultural achievement rather than with a specific political form, enabled a flexible religious nationalism adaptable to both monarchical and republican governance. This case complicates the binary between royalist and democratic forms of religious nationalism and has implications for understanding religion’s role in contemporary contexts of democratization, democratic backsliding, and regime change.

This paper elucidates the dynamics of moral social criticism in the transnational, cross-cultural missionary encounter, circa 1865-1900. It addresses the ways in which missionaries navigated questions of national identity and culture in the geopolitical interstices between nation-states. Turning to models of worldwide religious and cultural pluralism in American social life, such as the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, this paper investigates how ecumenical efforts to put religion on display, so to speak, galvanized the formal codification of cross-cultural missionary methods. Mining the discourse of seasoned missionaries (e.g., John L. Nevius), theologians (e.g., J. Gresham Machen), cultural relativists (e.g., Franz Boas), and grassroots efforts at missionary mobilization, I argue that cultural diversity on the world stage provided missionary-minded American Protestants a conceptual model for engaging religious diversity in their own nation. The outcome was the relativization of culture and intra-tradition criticism.

From posts weaving hunting into the MAHA movement and Bible study to podcasts arguing true hunters center “God, family, and country,” hunting influencers continuously make claims about whom hunting is for and what its, and thus the nation’s, future ought to look like.  Through close readings of hunting influencers’ social media posts and podcasts, I reveal the ways in which hunter influencers engage with, challenge, and reinforce white Christian men’s claimed ownership of hunting in the US.  This paper reveals, moreover, that claims about who the true hunter is rely on the discursive construction of who his enemies are, whether they be atheist liberals, misinformed bleeding-heart anti-hunters, or sellout hunter celebrities and their poseur followers.  To occupy the hunting manosphere is to be reminded that hunting is, and therefore you are, under constant threat.  As one influencer frequently puts it, “stay paranoid, hunters.”

This paper looks at several popular Jewish conservative male influencers as case studies for understanding the online “Jewish manosphere” and how its ideologues navigate questions of assimilation, Jewish-versus-Christian masculinity, antisemitism, and American nationalism. These case studies are illustrative for understanding the “edges” of how (Christian) manospheres are usually understood: I argue that these Jewish manosphere influencers, by situating their masculinity and their Judaism as consonant with—at times helpful for—American Christian nationalism, frame their gender and religion as part of a lineage that is just as respectable as that of white Christian Americans. Notably, such influencers frame their masculine Judaism in a way that delegitimizes other forms of American Jewish life, in particular the other minority groups that comprise them. This move is in line with many more mainstream, Christian manosphere figures, and the approaches to them highlighted in this panel’s papers.

Tech millionaire and wellness influencer Bryan Johnson has enjoyed a recent surge of internet fame. In addition to his usual posts about sleep scores, sperm health, and supplements, Johnson has taken an explicit turn towards the religious. He has recently launched Don’t Die, a New Religious Movement that highlights his efforts to pursue bodily immortality under the guidance of AI. Johnson aims to turn Don’t Die into “the world’s most popular ideology” by 2027 and has called it a religion, a way of life, and a nation-state. Johnson’s ambient masculinism and conservatism surface in connections with more outspoken right-wing figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tucker Carlson. How does the “world’s most measured man” theorize religion in the digital realm? Drawing from work in Digital Religion and Science and Technology Studies, this paper argues that Don’t Die exemplifies an emerging relationship between the AI industry, religion, and hybrid masculinity.

Active Clubs are the contemporary vanguard of American White nationalist counterculture. They encourage a return to an imagined heritage encompassing religious identity, vigorous masculinity, and ethnonationalism. The paper first examines Christianity, fascism, masculinity, and melee combat in American far-right movements; case studies like the Christian Front and the Legion of Silver Shirts illustrate that Active Clubs are merely a contemporary manifestation of a century-old ideological strain. However, Active Clubs are unique in their theological plasticity: Coalition-building efforts across religious lines are visible in Pagan-Christian cohabitation in the “Return to the Land” settlement, or in the Great Plains Active Club’s call for “men of all religions rooted in the European diaspora.” The paper concludes with an analysis of Active Club Telegram networks to suggest that the embodied nature of “White Nationalism 3.0” is a deliberate recruitment tool for young men who have grown tired of being perceived as “keyboard warriors.”

During the annual nativity festival of Rāmānuja (11th century) at his temple in Sriperumbudur, his tirumēṉi (sacred body), the metallic image conceived to embody his presence, is adorned in various ways and mounted on metallic vehicles (vāhanams). One such procession is called Veḷḷaiccāṟṟu (White Adornment), in which the ascetic mounts a golden horse, adorned in white garments. The festivities enact the hagiography of Rāmānuja fleeing a zealous Śaiva monarchs’ persecution. Upon returning to the temple, he is given a ritual shower, during which the 120-year-old monk's body is described in a near-erotic manner.

This paper examines the enactment of hagiographies in temple festivities. Its primary questions include how festive visual and material cultures enact hagiography; which hermeneutic tools are available to a participant expected to co-create hagiographic memory; and how we can understand the relationship between textual and festive narrations of history in the Hindu Traditions.

This paper examines samadhis—Indian burial sites—as active sites of memory-making at the Radha Damodar temple in Vrindavan, India. Focusing on the samadhi of Rupa Goswami, a central saint and theologian of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, the study highlights how this site embodies a complex interplay of place, history, memory, and materiality. Despite the Goswami’s significance, scholarly attention to his samadhi has been limited. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing how bhaktas enact remembrance through ritual performances that re-present the saint’s past presence. Practices such as touching, praying, sitting, rolling, and recitation, though common in Hindu temple contexts, acquire distinctive meaning in relation to the goswami’s samadhi. Drawing on the concepts of rasa and bhava, the ethnographic study interprets these acts as modalities of memory-making, showing how the past is continually reproduced and authorized through the materiality of the site. 

Reconstructing the histories of Hindu religious traditions requires navigating a central tension between static, institutional archives and the spontaneous religious expressions they attempt to capture and document. This paper examines the evolution of the fagvā, a prayer uttered by female devotees of the Svāmīnārāyaṇa Saṃpradāya that was later codified into verse. I first engage with questions of loss and preservation through versification to argue that it functioned as a deliberate technology of both preservation and pedagogy. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how the fagvā transcends its textual boundaries through contemporary ritual performance which allows the fagvā to operate as an embodied archive, one which connects and collapses historical time. This paper seeks to reframe the boundaries of the Hindu archive, demonstrating how religious histories are dynamically sustained through the intersection of institutional memory and lived practice. 

This paper examines shifting religious authority in nineteenth-century Gujarat, where Hindu and Jain reformers used "print-rationality" to critique traditional institutions like the hereditary Hindu Gãdi and Jain yatis. Amidst this upheaval, a radical counter-narrative emerged centering on the Satpurush (realized being). The recognition of Pragji Bhakta (Hindu) and Shrimad Rajchandra (Jain) as living guides challenged existing power structures. To legitimize these figures against institutional opposition, their communities curated a "Soteriological Archive of the Body." Physical austerity, meditative postures, and lived virtues became sovereign proof of sanctity. This archive provided an alternative to both failing traditional offices and the “rationalism” of colonial-era religious reformers (Sudharaks). By prioritizing the experiential realization of the present guide (pratyakṣ) over absent authorities (parokṣ) and strict rationalism, these movements established the realized body as the ultimate historical and soteriological archive.

In this paper, I will take up the 19th century Tibetan polymath Jamgön Kongtrul as a theorist of religion. Kongtrul's encyclopedic Treasury of Knowledge places the "inner science" of Buddhism alongside medicine, astrology, logic, and other Tibetan disciplines as intellectual and somatic crafts, locating all knowledge, religious and otherwise, in the relational transformation of persons rather than the correspondence of facts to an objective reality. Pursuing impartiality (rimé), Kongtrul presents a fractally multiplying series of accounts of everything from architecture to Buddhist soteriology, treating each contradictory possibility as an integral whole. Like his European parallels - whose desire for objective and universal knowledge still runs through Religious Studies – Kongtrul’s own hierarchical preferences shape his project. But in his insistence that relational particularity is what makes each way of knowing effective, Kongtrul offers us a different epistemic path. 

How does desire spatialize capital’s large-scale motion into Asia? Working in the Tibetan margins of global capital, this paper turns to the work of a Buddhist monk named Shérab Tendar (Shes rabs bstan dar, b. 1968). A prolific and controversial public intellectual from Qinghai in the PRC, Shérab Tendar relentlessly critiques rationalist desire (Tib. chags pa) at the heart of “Western economics” (nub pa’i dpal ‘byor rig pa) and the social scientific theorizing of the human more generally. He does so under the umbrella of an elaborate “Buddhist economics” (nang pa’i dpal ‘byor rig pa) rooted in a plethora of Buddhist scriptural sources and the alchemical logics of tantric transmutation and purity. Thinking with Shérab Tendar and his economy of tantric desire, this paper reconsiders the putative transparency of the secular and the exceptional neutrality of capitalism as independently articulated projects of modernity.

This paper presents textual ethnography as a collaborative way of making theory with Tibetan experts. Based on multi-year fieldwork among Tibetan communities in India, I suggest four principles of textual ethnographic work as a decolonial method for producing collaborative knowledge with and about Tibetan religious experts. I elevate Tibetan pedagogies and conceptual categories—such as lung (ལུང་།) reading transmission, samaya (དམ་ཚིག) commitments, and “ways of seeing” (མཐོང་ཚུལ།) as tools in a theoretical kit to be harnessed for religious studies beyond the purview of Buddhist traditions. The paper argues for research conducted in Tibetan and sustained through reciprocity and long-term presence, and it uses those commitments to rethink textual communities, religious authority, and gender in Do Khyentsé’s autobiography. Rather than romanticizing insider perspectives, the paper models multilingual, practice‑attuned partnership in which Tibetan interlocutors are recognized—and engaged—as co‑authors of theory.

This paper examines theories of body and embodiment in Tibetan Great Perfection (rdzogs chen) literature, focusing on transcorporeality, human bodies enmeshed in their worlds. Its primary source is The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs (mkha' 'gro snying thig), revealed by Pema Ledreltsal (pad+ma las 'brel rtsal, 1291–1315/17). In a world constituted by gnosis (ye shes), the authors of The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs theorized embodiment as porous, permeable, contagious, and enmeshed. The scripture regards bodies as interpenetrating other human bodies, divine bodies, elemental forces, and planetary cycles. Attending to this scripture's alterity on its own terms, the paper employs a decolonial framework that resists assimilating indigenous Buddhist categories into Western European philosophical norms. Instead, it treats the authors of this scripture as theorists of embodiment, whose work carries implications for both Buddhist studies and new materialism.

This paper examines the role of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist intellectuals as contributors to theoretical reflection about religion. In much of the academic study of religion, scholars have argued that theoretical analysis must be conducted from a critical distance outside religious traditions. In contrast, this paper argues that Tibetan Buddhist scholar-practitioners actively participate in theorizing religion from within their own traditions. Drawing on the Tibetan ideal of the khedrup (scholar-adept), it identifies three configurations of modern Buddhist intellectuals: traditional lineage holders engaged in interdisciplinary dialogue, hybrid scholar-practitioners who combine academic training with recognized religious authority, and academic scholars whose Buddhist practice informs their research. Figures such as the Dalai Lama, Anne Klein, and John Dunne illustrate how Tibetan Buddhist thinkers reinterpret doctrines, authority structures, and ethical practices in conversation with contemporary academic and scientific discourse. Recognizing them as theorists expands our understanding of how religious traditions generate critical reflection on religion.

What happens when we read Tibetan Buddhist dance masters not as informants about a local ritual practice, but as performance theorists whose conceptual frameworks challenge foundational assumptions about performance? To engage with this question, this paper turns to cham yik ('cham yig), or dance manuals, a genre of Tibetan Buddhist ritual literature devoted to monastic tantric dance.  Though they are most often thought of as choreographic notations, I argue that cham yik can also be understood as discursive arenas in which Tibetan scholars theorized performance itself. Reading them this way means not requiring the imposition of any Western theoretical grammar to draw out or make sense of these theories.  Rather, it only requires extending to them the same critical attention we have long given to canonical figures in the fields of religion and performance studies and that we remain open to having our assumptions unsettled in the process. 

This paper examines the legacy of Mary S. Slusser, an American scholar of Nepali art, and her role in the acquisition and relocation of Nepali cultural “artifacts” to Western institutions. Contending that Slusser’s knowledge claims legitimized intellectual and cultural dispossession, we explore three interrelated issues: the problematic claims to epistemic neutrality and authority in academic praxis, the tendency of such authority to overlook ethical dimensions inherent in knowledge claims, and the enduring colonial logic that informs scholarly approaches to the study of religion. Drawing on Buddhist teachings on śūnyatā (emptiness), the paper challenges Slusser’s materialist ontology, arguing that her work is both epistemologically flawed and ethically fraught. We propose a decolonial reparative model based on the Buddhist concept of upāya (skillful means) to challenge hierarchies of knowledge that systematically reproduce the non-white Other as objects of study and spectacle, while enabling Western institutions to evade ethical responsibility.

This paper situates the Tibetan concept of the “dream bardo” (rmi lam bar do) not as a subsidiary post-mortem stage, but as a theoretical model of habitually constructed experiential reality. Drawing on Prajñāpāramitā, Yogācāra, and tantric sources, it reconceptualizes consciousness as a trainable domain structured by karmic imprints (bag chags), in which a subtle “habit-body” (bag chags kyi lus) operates. Extending intermediate states beyond death, the dream bardo encompasses waking, meditative, and dream experience as continuous and transformable modes of awareness. It further analyzes the body, temporality, and practices of the dream bardo, where dreaming functions as an epistemology of illusion and a site of cultivation. By proposing bardo as process ontology and intermediate states as liminal thresholds, this framework offers new analytical tools for the study of religion. In dialogue with phenomenology and cognitive science, it challenges reductive models of dreaming and contributes to the decolonization of theoretical discourse.