Professor Harshita Kamath, who teaches Hinduism and South Asian religions in our department, was one of 25 faculty members honored for university-wide teaching awards during halftime of the UNC men’s basketball game on Jan. 20th vs. Georgia Tech. Prof. Kamath received the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, which “was established to recognize excellence in inspirational teaching of undergraduate students, particularly first- and second-year students.”

For the full list of faculty members receiving awards, click here.

Congratulations, Harshita!

Professor Carl Ernst, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor in Religious Studies, has devoted his academic life to translating Islam, linguistically and culturally. From his first book, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (1985), to his most recent book, co-edited with Fabrizio Speziale, Perso-Indica: An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions (2017), he has focused on how Islamic concepts have traveled across time and space. This conference, organized around themes in Islamic studies that Ernst’s work has addressed, evokes and expands on the major contributions of this fertile, creative translator of texts, ideas, and traditions within the orb of Islam.

The conference will take place October 6-7, 2017 at the Hampton Inn & Suites in Downtown Chapel Hill/Carrboro (370 E. Main Street, Carrboro, NC 27510).

For more information, including registration and schedule, consult the conference website here.

In late July (2017), Prof. Evyatar Marienberg met with British rockstar Sting for a detailed conversation as part of the research for his upcoming book about Sting and religion [update 2021: book published]. Sting, a.k.a. Gordon Sumner, was born in 1951 in North East England to a Catholic father and an Anglican mother. He went through Catholic schools through the crucial years before, during, and after the Vatican II council, and thus experienced a wildly changing Church as a young man. Even though he does not consider himself a Catholic today, Catholic imagery is extremely important in his lyrics.

Marienberg’s work is based on a variety of sources, including archival materials of all kinds (schools, diocese, parish, etc.), local newspapers from the time, and interviews. Last year, Sting read a significant part of the upcoming book, which prepared the way for their discussion in July which lasted almost 2.5 hours.

For a short article related to this project, click here.

For the 2017-18 academic year, Professor David Lambert will be a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem as part of a research group on the topic of “The Subject of Antiquity: Contours and Expressions of the Self in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures.” This project dovetails with his ongoing research on how modern notions of the self have shaped biblical interpretation. As the project description states:

“There is a growing scholarly consensus that new notions of the self emerged in Greco-Roman Antiquity, which prompted philosophers, artists, lawmakers and biographers to conceive of human beings as individuated selves, situated in specific cultural and historical contexts. We wish to examine these emerging discourses of the self, and their interaction and expressions in the material and textual culture of Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians.”

Professor Lambert also won a EURIAS fellowship to help support his work during the upcoming year. For more on the EURIAS award, click here.

Congratulations, David!

Two members of our faculty have recently received support and recognition for their scholarship with major awards:

Carl Ernst, William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor in Religious Studies, is one of the inaugural recipients of the Global Humanities Translation Prize from the Global Humanities Initiative, a program of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University. Professor Ernst’s project will involve producing an annotated translation of the classical Arabic poems of the Persian mystic Mansur al-Hallaj, and the finished work will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. For the official award announcement, see here.
 
 

Todd Ochoa, Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, has won a National Humanities Center fellowship for the 2017-18 academic year, representing one of only 35 fellows chosen out of 630 applications. Professor Ochoa will be working on a research project titled “Conjecture for a Bembé: Religious Recombination in the Black Atlantic,” and the fellowship provides the opportunity for interaction with the other resident fellows over the course of the academic year through seminars, lectures, and conferences. The announcement and full list of 2017-18 fellows can be found here.
 

Congratulations, Carl and Todd!