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VISITING SCHOLARS
Patricia Spyer (Leiden University)
Project: “Blind Faith: Religion, Violence, and Media in an Indonesian City”
Based on ethnographic research in Indonesia on religiously defined
conflict that broke out in Ambon City, the Moluccas, in 1999 and
the postconflict situation since 2002, the project is shaped
by three interrelated concerns:
1) the impact of mass and alternative media in the sedimentation
of religious violence and the creation of the grounds for reconciliation
and peace,
2) the rhetorics and politics of the mediations of violence and
postviolence, and 3) the transformations in religious sensibility
during and since the
war.
Elizabeth Castelli
(Barnard College at Columbia University)
Project: “Contemporary Philosophy's Turn toward Paul”
In recent years, various continental philosophers (Agamben, Badiou, Zizek, among others) have turned to the New Testament letters of Paul as a resource for articulating a new secular philosophy of religion. This project undertakes a reading of this philosophical turn but with a twist: she begins with the never-produced screenplay, "San Paolo," by Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose effort to wrest Paul from the world of antiquity and replant him dead-center in the political and cultural dramas of the twentieth century presages the work of Agamben, Badiou, Zizek, and others in the early twenty-first century. She will spend the fall semester at NYU translating Pasolini's "San Paolo" and reviewing the existing scholarship on the screenplay and on Pasolini's recasting of Christian scriptures.
Jeremy Stolow (Concordia University)
Project: “The Spiritual Telegraph and the Circum-Atlantic Imaginary in the Nineteenth Century”
This project explores spiritualism as a cultural index of the transforming technological environment of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, taking into account the deep and mutually determinative relationship between ideas and practices of spirit communication, and the institution and transatlantic spread of telegraphy. Telegraphy was the first significant industrial application of electricity and a harbinger of our contemporary networks of global communication. Through an analysis of scientific, religious and popular texts produced during the telegraphy’s golden age (roughly, 1850-1880), the project critically examines three inter-related phenomena: the role played by telegraphic communication systems in the expansion and institutionalization of the Spiritualist movement, as well as in the growing visibility of the movement in the transatlantic public sphere; the sedimentation of the language of telegraphy, and its electrical metaphors, in the Spiritualist imagination; and the material culture of electrical devices used within seance practice to demonstrate the existence of the spirit world, and register the effects of spirit possession on the bodies of spirit mediums. Parts of this research are being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Carly Machado, UERJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
For more information, visit his websites: http://www.jeremystolow.com/content/blogcategory/7/14/
http://www.ghostlymachine.com/
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