Dept. of Political Science EDGS Speaker Series in “Religion, law, and politics”
Organizer: Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Sponsor: Equality, Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS) Program
Co-sponsors: Department of Political Science, Department of Religious Studies, Graduate Student Workshop in Religion & Global Politics
Location: Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies, 1902 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208
Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm/lunch included
Description:
The series will bring together seven distinguished scholars with Northwestern faculty, graduate and undergraduate students interested in the interaction of law, religion, culture and politics in social, historical, political and legal contexts. Serving as a forum for reflection on theoretical, methodological, and critical issues in law and society, religion and diversity, and culture and politics in the US and globally, the series will traverse disciplinary boundaries to explore these questions drawing on insights from political science, law, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, and history.
The series will complement and contribute to discussions, teaching, and institution building in this field at Northwestern, including the Religion & Global Politics Certificate Program, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Robert Orsi’s graduate seminar “Religion and Modernity” (Winter 2015), and the Graduate Student Workshop on Religion & Global Politics led by Mona Oraby and Ariel Schwartz.
Professor Alessandro Ferrari will be visiting Northwestern in fall 2014 as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies, and Professor Vanja Savic will be in residence in the fall and winter quarters, also affiliated with BCICS.
Speakers, Dates and Titles of Presentations:
October 16, 2014: Alessandro Ferrari, Associate Professor, Department of Law, Economy and Cultures at the Università degli Studi dell’Insubria and Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies, Fall 2014.
Title: “The Politics of Religious Freedom in the Mediterranean: Between Arab Spring and European Autumn?”
Alessandro Ferrari, Llb University 0f Modena (1993), PhD Law and Religion University of Milano (1999), PhD Canon Law (University of Paris XI (2003) is Associated Professor in the Department of Law, Economy and Cultures of the University of Insubria (Varese and Como) and permanent visiting professor at the Research Master “Islamologie, Droit et Gestion” at the University of Strasbourg. He is scientific director of the Research Center “Religion, Law and Economy in Mediterranean Area” (REDESM) at the University of Insubria where he teaches Law and Religion, Comparative Religious Laws and Mediterranean Islam. His most recent books include Libertà religiosa in Italia. Un percorso incompiuto (Carocci, Roma 2012) and The burqa affair across Europe, ed. with Sabrina Pastorelli (Ashgate, Farnham 2013).
October 30, 2014: Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Professor and Chair, Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Affiliate Professor of Law, Maurer School of Law.
Title: “Spiritual Governance: The Chaplain as Priest of the Secular”
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies and Affiliate Professor of Law at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (Harvard 1994), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton 2005), Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton 2009), andA Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law (Chicago 2014). She is also co-editor of After Secular Law (Stanford 2011), Varieties of Religious Establishment (Ashgate 2013), and Politics of Religious Freedom (forthcoming from Chicago 2015).
January 20, 2015: Vanja-Ivan Savic, Assistant Professor, University of Zagreb Faculty of Law.
Title: “After the Age of Communism: Religious Life, Law, and National Identity in East and Central Europe”
Vanja-Ivan Savić is a Croatian lawyer and Assistant Professor at the University of Zagreb, Croatia and also Visiting Scholar at Buffett Center at Northwestern where he is working on the project: “Law as a Tool for Religious Cohabitation: Religious Laws and Laws on Religion in Modern Europe, Middle East and North Africa”. Savic graduated from University of Zagreb Faculty of Law cum laude, where he obtained his First Law Degree and later, a Master of Science in Law and Ph.D. degree in Legal Theory (2010). In 2005 he was British Chevening Scholar at The University of Edinburgh, and in 2010 was an International Fellow at DePaul University’s International Human Rights Law Institute in Chicago. Savić works in Legal Theory, Theory of Law and State, Law and Religion, Corporate Criminal Law and Human Rights. He has participated in various conferences and workshops including “Change, State, Religion, and Politics” in Cracow, Poland in 2009, “Religion and Politics in the Era of Globalization” in Cluj-Napoca, Romania in 2012 and “Religion, Democracy and Law” at London Metropolitan University in 2014. He has also conducted workshops on combating human trafficking for Vietnamese lawyers at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi and for Croatian lawyers and students at the Inter-University Center for Advanced Studies in Dubrovnik, Croatia. In collaboration with Professor Richard Farkas from DePaul, Savic created an academic blog dedicated to political, ethnic, religious and legal problems of Bosnia and Herzegovina entitled “Chicago Initiative for Bosnia”. Most recently, he served as “Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow” at University of Adelaide’s Research Unit for the Study of Society, Law and Religion. He has published articles in Croatian, English, and Vietnamese, and his textbook on Criminal Liability of Juristic Persons has just been published. Dr. Savic is promoting the development of a Law and Religion curriculum at his home institution.
January 22, 2015: Ruth Marshall, Associate Professor, University of Toronto
Title: “Global Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of Evangelism in the Global South”
Ruth Marshall is Associate Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (U. Chicago Press, 2009) and numerous scholarly articles on the political implications of Pentecostalism and postcolonial politics in West Africa. She’s interested in the contemporary nexus between religion and politics and the challenge of clearing an analytical space in which the political productivity of religious discourse and practice may be analyzed non-reductively. She is currently undertaking two major research projects, one funded by the SSRC, investigating prayer as a form of political praxis, and the other studying the political implications of the evangelization of Europe and North America by Pentecostals from the Global South. In 2013-14 she was a Chancellor Jackman Fellow in the Humanities at the U of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute where she began work on a new book which examines the renewed ethico-political force of religious language in the public sphere and the political challenge that global revivalism poses to democratic forms of life, while exploring the possibilities and limits of a post-secular politics of translation for articulating a new relationship between the religious and the political.
February 19, 2015: Benjamin L. Berger, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.
Title: “Law’s Religion: Religious Difference and the Conceits of Constitutionalism”
Benjamin L. Berger is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a member of the faculty of the Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies at York University. He served as law clerk to the Rt. Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in law. Professor Berger writes and teaches in the areas of law and religion, constitutional and criminal law and theory, and the law of evidence. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, associate editor of Hart Publishing’s “Constitutional Systems of the World,” and co-edited The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (UBC Press, 2008). Professor Berger convenes the Osgoode Colloquium in Law, Religion & Social Thought: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/lrst.
April 23, 2015: Noah Salomon, Assistant Professor of Religion, Carleton College
Title:“When the State is Everywhere: Rethinking the Islamic Public Sphere”
Noah Salomon is Assistant Professor of Religion at Carleton College. His research has explored the intersection of Islamic ways of life and modern modes of power and has taken place in Sudan and South Sudan. In Sudan, he has explored the project of Islamic state-building and the engagement with its effects by a diverse group of Muslim organizations. In South Sudan, he has examined the attempt to construct a secular state out of the ashes of the Islamic state project, as well as the discursive construction of a Muslim minority that has emerged out of this arrangement. Salomon is at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton through December 2014, finishing a book manuscript based on his Sudan research. A list of recent and forthcoming publications can be found on his Carleton College website.
May 7, 2015: Jeremy Menchik, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Boston University.
Title: “Productive Intolerance: Godly Nationalism in Indonesia.”
Jeremy Menchik is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University specializing in comparative politics, religion and politics, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. His publications are forthcoming in Comparative Studies in Society and History and Southeast Asia Research. His forthcoming book explains the meaning of tolerance to the leaders of the world’s largest Islamic organizations in order to understand how their values shape politics in a Muslim-majority democracy. Based on twenty-four months of field research, the book intervenes in major debates about religion and modernity, Islam and politics, and the future of political theory in a post-secular world. After receiving his PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin, he held fellowships at Columbia University, Stanford University, and the American University of Beirut before joining Boston University, where he coordinates the MA program in International Relations and Religion.