“A View from Canada: Toronto and the ‘American’ Academy of Religion”

What is the place of Canada within the “American” Academy of Religion? How do geopolitics and national borders shape the work of teaching and scholarship? The current U.S. Presidential administration brings renewed and urgent attention to these questions. In this roundtable panel, a group of University of Toronto alumni reflect on their experiences working on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. The Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto was formed fifty years ago, alongside the postwar rise of religious studies in the U.S. Its subsequent growth, like that of the city of Toronto, was shaped by the economics of a historical period that has now changed. Our roundtable panelists’ reflections use Toronto as a site for reflecting on the cultural history of the study of religion as a North American disciplinary formation, and for speculating about this discipline’s possible futures.