• March 15 | A Buddhist Sensibility | Book Talk with Dominique Townsend and Stacey Van Vleet
• March 16 | Made Instrument, Made Flesh, Made Blackqueer | Ashon Crawley
• March 28 | Racial Capitalism’s Inner Life: Security, Police Power, and the Tactics of Ensoulment | Lee Medovoi
• March 31 | Rifts and Revelations: How Religion Has Shaped Pandemic Responses in the United States | Marla Frederick, Jim Oleske, Munir Jiwa, Ronit Stahl
• April 12 | Consensus and Early Islamic Law | Asad Ahmed 
• April 27 | Voting from the Rooftops: Reflections on Religion and Politics from Mughal India | Abhishek Kaicker

• Jonathan Tran | Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism: Race, Religion, and Democracy 
• Sahar Aziz | The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom 
• Josine Blok | Through the Looking Glass: Perspectives on the Interaction Between 'Politics' and 'Religion' in Ancient Greece 
• Rebecca Davis | I Know the Truth: Muhammad Ali, Brainwashing, and the Racial Politics of Religious Authenticity 

Applications for the Designated Emphasis in the Study of Religion are now open. Please note that applications are due Thursday, March 31, 2022 at 5 pm.

The Designated Emphasis in the Study of Religion (DESR) supports graduate training in Religious Studies and in the Theory of the Study of Religion, promotes graduate research on topics related to religion, and brings together a cross-disciplinary faculty Group in the Study of Religion. Recognizing that many Berkeley students across the Humanities and Social Sciences are already deeply engaged in the study of religious phenomena, the DESR creates a space where those students may come together and focus on the history and theory of how others have approached such phenomena. Since Berkeley currently has no department of Religious Studies, the DESR also integrates professional approaches derived from Theology and Religious Studies, alongside those derived from other cultural traditions and critical approaches to religion...(more)

Application Process:

The application due date for 2022–2023 is Thursday, March 31 at 5 pm. Please submit:

• A completed Petition for Admission to the DESR form (download here)
• A statement of intent (500-1000 words) describing how religion relates to your dissertation project or research interests
• Recommendation form (download here) sent from a faculty member preferably in your home department (potentially an adviser) under separate cover

For more details, please visit the Designated Emphasis page on the BCSR website. Please submit applications materials via email to info.bcsr@berkeley.edu. 

Dominique Townsend, Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at Bard College
Stacey Van Vleet, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley

Tuesday, March 15 | 12 pm 
Online via Zoom. Register here

A Buddhist Sensibility generates a novel perspective on Tibetan Buddhist history by focusing on aesthetics—encompassing the fields of music, visual arts, poetry, dance, and even the olfactory sense through incense production. Through the case study of this monastic history, Townsend argues that the Buddhist engagement with and cultivation of the senses connects the spheres of religion and the secular.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of History. 

Ashon Crawley, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia

Wednesday, March 16 | 4 pm 
Online via Zoom. Register here

From ongoing research that combines oral history, musical analysis, social commentary and cultural critique, this talk takes the Hammond organ–invented in the 1930s and now part of Americana’s sound and symbolism–as the specific object through which a conversation about sex, sexuality and spirituality converges. What does listening to this specific instrument within the particular occasion of Black Church religiosity reveal to us about a general renouncing of the possibility for imagination, for relation, for care?

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Graduate Student Working Group on Religion.

Lee Medovoi, Professor of English at the University of Arizona

Monday, March 28 | 2 pm 
Online via Zoom. Register here

In Cedric Robinson’s early iteration, “racial capitalism,” placed antiblackness at the heart of capitalist historical dynamics by showing how the black/white color line has motored the process of capital accumulation. Yet racial capitalism has additional applications. It engages the expropriative logic of settler colonial seizures of land and resources, where capitalist racialization provides the alibi for primitive accumulation. Moishe Postone has also theorized antisemitism as a right-wing anticapitalist politics that fetishistically employs the Jew to figure the danger of finance capital’s abstract power. This theory, when redirected to the abstraction of “terror” as a threat to capital, can also help account for Islamophobia. Is it possible to connect these distinctive forms and histories of racialization within an overarching account of racial capitalism?

Presented by the Department of Ethnic Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, and the Program in Critical Theory.

Marla Frederick, Professor of Religion and Culture at Emory University
Jim Oleske, Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School
Munir Jiwa, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Anthropology at the Graduate Theological Union
Ronit Stahl, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley

Thursday, March 31 | 4 pm 
Online via Zoom. Register here 

Join us for a conversation about how religion has shaped responses to Covid-19 in the United States, including both the impact of the pandemic on religious communities, ideas of health and wellness, and the relationship between law and religious freedom, over the past couple of years.

Presented by the Othering & Belonging Institute and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

Asad Ahmed, Professor of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures at UC Berkeley

Tuesday, April 12 | 5 pm
3335 Dwinelle Hall and Online via Zoom. Register here

This lecture investigates democratic approaches to legal formulations in Islam from the perspective of the principle of consensus. Accepted as having probative force in practically all Islamic legal traditions, the principle is often understood in pre-modern and modern literature as a means of establishing positive law by appeal to the customary practices in a region and/or the shared legal opinions of a generation of scholars. As such, it also emerges as a vehicle for establishing and perpetuating normative practices and for narrowing the scope for legal change. The intricacies of theoretical reflections on consensus—as opposed to its practical legal applications—reveal a rather different perspective. In the Islamic legal-theoretical tradition, consensus can be read as an agreement on a shared hypothetical system of argumentation. Inasmuch as each legal tradition within Islam has a consensus on the hypothetical validity of each alternative system as an internally consistent set of propositions, it grants the possibility of multiple modes of legal discourse. This lecture explores certain theories of consensus—often dubbed “compound consensus” in the tradition—as democratic grounds for legal disruption.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation.

Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley

Wednesday, April 27 | 5 pm
370 Dwinelle Hall and Online via Zoom. Registration coming soon. 

Given the apparent lack of engagement with Greco-Roman thought on democracy and republicanism in India before modernity, in what way might we relate a history of voting the divine in the region? In this lecture I will suggest that despite the absence of practices such as voting, we may observe the entanglement of the practices of collective decision-making with sacral engagements across South Asia in the early modern period. To see such entanglements, however, will require us to question the standard distinctions which have divided the realm of politics from that of religion in the study of the region.   

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation.

To view the recordings, please visit the following event pages:

• Jonathan Tran | Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism: Race, Religion, and Democracy
• Sahar Aziz | The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom 
• Josine Blok | Through the Looking Glass: Perspectives on the Interaction Between 'Politics' and 'Religion' in Ancient Greece 
• Rebecca Davis | I Know the Truth: Muhammad Ali, Brainwashing, and the Racial Politics of Religious Authenticity