Thirteen scholars from around the world will participate in the Center's second symposium to be held Feb. 7-9.
Scholars from Europe, China, and around the U.S. will converge on the Numen Lumen Pavilion Feb. 7-9 to participate in the bi-annual symposium hosted by the Elon Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society.
Titled, “The Religious Body Imagined,” this symposium will examine how the body is conceived in various religious traditions and how religions depict the body’s various functions, roles and transformative effects. Papers will consider a range of topics, including the ways the religious body is represented in art or architecture, the agency of gendered, queer, aged and disabled bodies, the role of religion in colonial contexts and migration histories, the sacrifice of human or animal bodies, healing, the treatment of dying or dead bodies, and even out of body experiences.
It asks, says symposium convener and Associate Professor of Religious Studies Pamela Winfield, “How does our experience of the body shape our conceptions of the sacred and, conversely, how does the sacred re-embodied in concrete physical form?”
The CSRCS symposium is hosted every two years by Elon's Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society (CSRCS). It is organized by two Elon faculty members from different departments who announce the theme and invite participants.
CSRCS Director Brian Pennington explained that this interdisciplinarity is central to the symposium’s purpose. “The question for us always is, ‘what more is added to our understanding of cultural movements when we invite scholars from across the academy to look at an issue with us together?’,” Pennington said.
Co-convener Mina Garcia Soormally from the Department of World Languages & Cultures says she hopes the symposium “will find interesting points of debate and insight at the intersections of the multiple disciplines as scholars explore the meaning of the religious body across cultures, from East to West, and across history.”
The symposium’s timing also dovetails well with the conveners’ research agendas. Spring 2019 will coincide with the publication of Garcia Soormally’s new book, "Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire," just as Winfield’s work on her third manuscript, "Temple Bodies: Material and Rhetorical Anatomies of Sōtō Zen," picks up. In addition to their contributions, Elon Professor of History Clyde Ellis will present recent research on the figure of Jesus in Native American Christianity.
In the opening keynote address for the symposium, S. Brent Plate of Hamilton College will discuss the history of dolls, from automatons to action figures to robots, in a lecture titled, “Searching for the Soul in the Doll’s Body: Spiritual Technologies from Golem to Barbie, Sex Dolls to Artificial Intelligence." Plate's keynote will be held on Thursday, Feb. 7, from 5:45 to 7 p.m. at Yaeger Recital Hall.
Elizabeth Rhodes of Boston College)will offer a closing keynote on Saturday, Feb. 9 from 10:15 to 11:30 a.m. in the Numen Lumen Pavilion. Both talks are free and open to the public.
Other sessions of the symposium will take place in small working groups where the scholars in attendance will offer feedback on the papers in progress. Winfield, Garcia Soormally and Pennington expect to publish an anthology of this research in a forthcoming edited volume.
The symposium will also offer an important professionalization opportunity for Elon students to observe and take part in its deliberations. "They will be able to see how scholars discuss and debate one another's ideas," Pennington said. In addition, a poster session in which undergraduates present their projects to the symposium participants will take place on Friday afternoon.
Last but not least, the symposium will be accompanied by an art exhibit from the Cowan Collection of Religious Art that will be on display at the Numen Lumen Pavilion through the duration of the conference.
More information can be found here: https://www.elon.edu/u/academics/csrcs/on-the-edge/.