CFP: Religion, Secularism and Nationhood

Call for Papers

Religion, Secularism and Nationhood

April 3-4, 2009

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The British Modernities Group, in conjunction with the University of Illinois Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, invites submissions from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and methodological orientations for our annual graduate student conference, this year themed “Religion, Secularism and Nationhood.” The conference will open with a keynote address by Gauri Viswanathan of Columbia University.

In response to the changing articulations of religious subjectivity and religious communities in the so-called post-secular world, it is crucial to heed the double aspect of religion as a “scrupulous observance,” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, and as the means of social cohesion. As a wide range of scholars have suggested, this “religious turn” also calls for critical interventions in narratives of secularization and nationhood. Edward Said’s deployment of “secularism” as an epistemological category to critique nationalism and Benedict Anderson’s comparison of national ceremonies and religious rituals emphasize ties between religion, secularism and nationhood. This graduate conference will engage this critical trend by focusing on how religious controversies circumscribe national identity in "Greater Britain" (including transnational and international formations) in textual cultural production from the eighteenth century to the present moment. It will also investigate religion’s central role in colonial expansion and in establishing and questioning cultural difference.

Possible topics for consideration include but are not limited to:

• secularization, progress and modernity
• religion, nationalism and community
• pluralism and tolerance
• knowledge and faith
• empire and the unassimilable “Other”
• political theology and public religions
• alternative religious histories
• conversion, historicity and secrecy

This plenary-style conference is designed to facilitate dialogue between panels, participants, and attendees. To that end, panelists are strongly encouraged to attend the full conference, scheduled late Friday and all day Saturday. Presenters will be expected to submit their papers to their panel’s faculty respondent by March 14, 2009.

Please send 300-word abstracts for individual 15-minute papers to modernities@gmail.com. The deadline for abstract submissions is February 15, 2009. Accepted applicants will be notified by February 20, 2009. In the body of the e-mail, please include the following information: name, university and departmental affiliation(s), level of graduate study, and title of paper.

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