In the last few weeks, Religious Studies students had opportunities to visit the Wilson Special Collections Library to view a variety of objects and works in connection with current courses.

Professor Joseph Lam led a group of graduate students in Akkadian on a visit to view the cuneiform tablets and other related objects in their Special Collections. Cuneiform was the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, involving the use of a stylus to make triangular wedges on clay. These are the oldest objects in Wilson Library (the oldest of which are dated to before 2000 BCE). They were hosted by Dr. Emily Kader, the Rare Books Research Librarian at Wilson Library.

Emily Kader giving an introduction to handling cuneiform tablets.

A cuneiform tablet envelope from ancient Mesopotamia.

Professor Brandon Bayne’s RELI 448 class, ‘Religion in Early America’, also had the opportunity to work with a variety of original sources and rare books in Wilson Library. Guided by Sarah Carrier, a librarian with the North Carolina Collection, the students examined a diverse set of Moravian, Quaker, Baptist, Presbyterian, Muslim, and Jewish documents produced in NC before the Civil War.

Prof. Bayne’s class working with Wilson Library’s rare books.

Posted in News & Events on November 26, 2019. Bookmark the permalink.

Undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows are invited to submit abstracts to the fourth meeting of Feminisms Here and Now, an interdisciplinary conference organized by PhD students in the Departments of Communication and Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies.

This year’s theme – “Difficult Attachments” – draws from discussions around our three prior themes, “An Interdisciplinary Conversation,” “Alongside | Across | Against,” and “Continuities and Contradictions,” by taking up the complexities of connection, wherever they may lie. Our previous meeting produced a lively conversation around the difficult attachment many of us have to the myth of scarcity, and the limited vision such an attachment can produce. This year’s theme seeks to build upon that insight and broaden its implications by exploring the notions of both difficulty and attachment through various feminist lenses, here and now.”

For the official call for papers, click here. The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2019, and participants will be notified of acceptance by October 15, 2019.

Registration is free and required in order to attend. For more information, visit the conference website.

The 2019 season of the archeological excavations at Huqoq in Israel’s Galilee, led by Professor Jodi Magness, recently ended at the end of June. This season’s work uncovered new parts of the mosaic floor from the ancient Huqoq synagogue at the site. Among the new mosaics are the depictions of the four beasts described in the book of Daniel and the first depiction of the episode of Elim, the place where the Israelites camped after leaving Egypt and wandering through the wilderness without water.

For more details on the recent findings and the work Magness has done in the past, read here, here and here.

For reports from previous seasons of excavations at Huqoq, see here (7/6/2016), here (7/9/2017) and here (7/17/2018). You can also visit the excavation’s webpage at huqoq.org.

A detail from the Elim mosaic. (Jim Haberman, Courtesy: UNC-Chapel Hill)

The Department of Religious Studies is excited to host the 2019 annual conference of the North Carolina Religious Studies Association (NCRSA) on October 5. It will be held in Carolina Hall on UNC Chapel Hill’s Campus.

The program is now available and registration is now open on the NCRSA website. Registration is $20 if you register by September 30, and $25 if you register the day of the conference. Undergraduate and graduate students are exempt from this registration fee.

The NCRSA is looking for proposals or abstracts of papers, completed papers, or topics for panel discussion on any area in the academic study of religion and of philosophy as it pertains to religion. The Association will honor the best undergraduate and graduate student essays with a stipend of $100 each, to be awarded at the conference. Submissions are due by June 30.

To learn more about submitting an essay, visit the NCRSA website.