During Spring Quarter Prof. Heidi Pauwels organized an informal reading group of the famous Classical Hindi version of the story of the Rāmāyana by the 16th-17th century poet Tulsīdās, sometimes referred to as the Bible of North Indian Hinduism. This was occasioned by the new publication of a reading guide featuring selections from the text

African Studies Interim Chair and affiliate Comparative Religion faculty, Christopher Tounsel, spoke with Christianity Today  about the current conflict in Sudan and its effects on the Christian population. Read more here.

African Studies Interim Chair and affiliate Comparative Religion faculty, Christopher Tounsel, spoke with APF News about Pope Frances’s first-ever Papal visit to South Sudan. Read more here.

Congratulations to African Studies Interim Chair, Christopher Tounsel! The Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora has named Tounsel’s book Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan (Duke University Press) as a Finalist for its 2022 Outstanding First Book Award. ASWAD Outstanding First Book Prize The Outstanding First Book Prize annually honors an outstanding

Sasha Senderovich, an assistant professor at the Jackson School and Slavic Languages and Literature, was named a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award 2022 in the category Modern Jewish Thought and Experience for his book  “How the Soviet Jew Was Made” (Harvard University Press, 2022). The award is hosted by the New York-based Jewish

In his article “Christmas lights – brought to you by a Jew from the Muslim world,” published this morning Dec. 21 in The Washington Post’s Made by History column, Devin Naar analyzes how Jews from the Ottoman Empire pioneered the Christmas-lights market a century ago — but nativism, antisemitism and Islamophobia obscured this history.

M.A. Applications: International Studies – Comparative Religion The application deadline for all Jackson School MAIS programs is January 31, 2023. The Jackson School offers nine programs that lead to an MAIS degree: seven world area-studies programs, a comparative religion program, and a comparative and thematic program in international studies that concentrates on the interaction of

Arzoo Osanloo, director of the Middle East Center, associate professor of the Law, Societies, and Justice program, and affiliate faculty for Comparative Religion is the featured guest in an NPR Throughline podcast episode titled, “The Woman Question,” on how while what’s happening in Iran right now is unprecedented, the Iranian people’s struggle for gender equality began generations before

What did it mean to be a Jewish minority in an Arab-Islamic society? How did Judaism shape Islam and vice versa? What is the future of Jewish-Arab relations? Today, Jews and Arabs sometimes seem to be entrenched in a timeless conflict. But for centuries, over 90% of the world’s Jews lived, worked, and thrived (or

This past Winter, Professor Pauwels taught her class, Gender and the Hindu Goddess (RELIG 456), during which the students were treated to a virtual visit (and those who wanted to an in-person one) to the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s (SAM) special exhibit, “Embodied Change: South Asian Art Across Time.” The students were given the option