The Center for Religion and Media
The Center for Media, Culture and History
The Religious Studies Program
present:

Religious Witness: The Intimate, the Everyday, the World
Thursday, May 6 - Saturday May 8, 2004
Kimmel Center for Student Life
60 Washington Square South
download word .doc of this program

introduction
program
participant bios
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The notion of witnessing undergirds many religious traditions. It may invoke modalities beyond the visual, as the primary significance of sound in Judaism and Islam makes clear. With the proliferation of a variety of media technologies such as video, film, audiocassette, miniaturized landscapes, and internet, the power of religious witnessing is amplified and sometimes transformed.

This conference explores the power of both visual and sonic imagery across a range of media forms -- to produce "special affects" that help generate religious sensibilities in different social arenas and that facilitate the transportation of religious experience through time. These range from the intimate world of life cycle celebrations, to the permeation of everyday life with sacred sound, to the centrality of mediated testimony in projects concerned with religious rights, humanitarianism, and global justice.
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Thursday, May 6
SESSION I: THE HOLY LAND EXPERIENCE
1:30-5:00 pm Kimmel Center, 405/406

1:30-2:30 pm
Presentation: Joan Branham, The Temple that Won't Quit: Constructing Sacred Space in Orlando's Holy Land

3:00-5:00 pm
Other Holy Lands, Other Experiences
Moderator: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Respondents: Barry Flood, Angela Zito
Discussants: Adam Becker, Elizabeth Castelli, Judah Cohen, Jeffrey Feldman, Miriam Peskowitz, Jeremy Stolow

KEYNOTE ADDRESS I
Stewart M. Hoover, Media, Meaning, and Religion: Research on Identities of Daily Life
5:30-7:00 pm Kimmel Center, Rosenthal Pavilion

RECEPTION
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Friday, May 7
SESSION II: MEDIATING RITUALS
9:00 am - 12:30 pm Kimmel Center, 405/406
Moderator: Barbara Abrash

9:00 – 10:30 am
Presentation: Jeffrey Shandler, Rites of the Beholder: ‘Home Movies’ as Witness in American Jewish Life Cycle Rituals
Discussants: Faye Ginsburg, Michael Renov

10:45 am -12:30 pm
Presentation: Alan Berliner, “Like My Father Before Me":
(Old and New) Home Movies in the Films of Alan Berliner
Presentation: Melissa Shiff and Louis Kaplan, Avant-Garde Jewish Wedding: Projecting Media, Reinventing the Rite
Discussants: Michael Renov, Jeffrey Shandler

LUNCHTIME PRESENTATION
12:45 – 1:45 pm Kimmel Center, 405/406
Presentation: Jeffrey Sharlet and Jay Rosen, The Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion and the Press

SESSION III: CIRCULATING ISLAMS
2:00-4:30 pm Kimmel Center, 405/406
Moderator: Ella Shohat
Panel:
Brian Larkin, Ahmed Deedat and the Rise of Islamic Pentecostalism
Flagg Miller, Transcending Invention in Islam: Circulation, Textual Authority, and the Politics of Audiocassettes in Yemen
Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Negotiating the Forbidden: Women and Sex in Iranian Cinema
Discussant: Michael M.J. Fischer

KEYNOTE ADDRESS II
5:00-6:30 pm Kimmel Center, 405/406
Patsy Spyer, Orphaning the Nation: Violence, Sentimentality, and Media in the Wake of Ambon's War
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Saturday, May 8
SESSION IV: THE SOUND OF ISLAMIC WORLDS
9:30 am -12:00 noon, Kimmel Center, 905/907
Moderator: Michael Gilsenan
Panel:
Magnus Marsden, Mahfils and Musicians: New Muslims in Chitral Town, North Pakistan
Martin Stokes Wedding Bands, Media and Turkey's Islamist Public Sphere
Anne Rasmussen, Islamic Musical Arts and the Aesthetics of Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Indonesia
Benjamin Zimmer, For the Love of the Prophet: New Media Models of Conspicuous Piety for Indonesian Children
Discussant: Birgit Meyer

LUNCH

SESSION V: TECHNOLOGIES OF WITNESSING
1:30-3:30 pm, Kimmel Center, 905/907
Moderator: Meg McLagan
Panel:
Anne Cubilié, The Great Divide in Human Rights: Testimony and Witnessing Between Academic and Practitioner
Leshu Torchin, Ravished Armenia: Early Film Activism
Discussants: Sam Gregory, Tom Keenan, Minoo Moallem

SESSION VI: CIRCUITS OF SUFFERING
4:00-6:00 pm Kimmel Center, 905/907
Moderator: Ann Pellegrini
Panel:
Ann Cvetkovich, Making Testimony Matter: The 9/11 Oral History Archive
Allen Feldman, Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing and the Trauma Aesthetic
Discussants: Elizabeth Castelli, Musa Dube, Renata Salecl.

PROGRAM SUBJECT TO CHANGE
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Biographies
Barbara Abrash (Center for Media, Culture and History) is an independent documentary producer, writer, editor and film programmer; Associate Director of the Center for Religion and Media; and Associate Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU, where she teaches in the graduate program in Public History.

Adam Becker (Religious Studies, NYU) is co-editor with Annette Yoshiko Reed of The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

Alan Berliner’s experimental documentary films include The Sweetest Sound(2001), Nobody’s Business (1996), Intimate Stranger (1991), and The Family Album (1986). His photographic, audio and video installation works include, Gathering Stones, an interactive video installation commissioned for the exhibition, To The Rescue, Eight Artists in an Archive, which premiered at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

Joan R. Branham (Art History, Providence College) teaches courses on ancient and medieval visual cultures. Her research has focused on critical interpretations of sacred space in late-antique Judaism and Christianity. Her forthcoming book, Sacred Space in Ancient and Early Medieval Architecture (Cambridge), examines the relationship of ancient synagogues and churches to the spatial systems in the Jerusalem Temple.

Elizabeth A. Castelli (Religion, Barnard College at Columbia University) is 2003-2004 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media, NYU. She is the author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (Columbia, 2004) and co-author, as a member of the Bible and Culture Collective, of The Postmodern Bible (Yale, 1995).

Judah Cohen (Hebrew Judaic Studies, NYU) is the author of Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands (Brandeis, 2003), as well as essays on Jewish musical modes and songleading at Jewish summer camps. He is currently writing a book about the issues associated with becoming a Jewish cantor at the turn of the 21st century.

Anne Cubilié currently consults, primarily to the United Nations, on gender, education and human rights. She recently completed a book manuscript, The Crisis of Human Rights: Testimony and Cultural Politics, and co-edited, “The Future of Testimony,” a double issue of the journal Discourse. Her current research is on the violent practices of the Egyptian state against homosexual men, and the women family members of men arrested as Islamists.

Ann Cvetkovich (English and Women's Studies, University of Texas at Austin), is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism(Rutgers, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003). With Ann Pellegrini, she recently guest edited, “Public Sentiments,” a special issue of The Feminist and Scholar Online.

Musa Dube (The Claremont Colleges, Scripps College) is an author of Postcolonial Feminist Interpretations of the Bible (Chalice Press, 2003) and Grant Me Justice: HIV/AIDS and Gender Readings of the Bible (forthcoming Orbis & Cluster) and has edited HIV/AIDS and the Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Programs (WCC 2003) and Africa Praying: A Handbook of HIV/AIDS Sensitive Sermons and Liturgy (forthcoming WCC 2004).

Allen Feldman (Culture and Communication, NYU) is the author of Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago, 1991) and numerous articles including most recently: "Ground Zero Point One: On the Cinematics of History" (Social Analysis, 2002), and "Strange Fruit: the South African Truth Commission and the Demonic Economies of Violence" (Social Analysis, 2003).

Jeffrey Feldman (Museum Studies Program, NYU) has written several articles, including. “The Jewish Roots and Routes of Anthropology" (Anthropological Quarterly, 2004); “One Tragedy in Reference to Another: September 11 and the Obligations of Museum Commemoration," (American Anthropologist 2003); and “Ghetto Association: Jewish Heritage, Heroin and Racism in Bologna,” (Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2001).

Michael M.J. Fischer (Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies, MIT). He is the author of: Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Harvard, 1980), Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago with George Marcus, 1986, 2nd edition 1999), Debating Muslims (Wisconsin with Mehdi Abedi, 1990), and the forthcoming volumes Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice; Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry.

Finbarr Barry Flood (Fine Arts, NYU) is the author of The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Making of an Umayyad Visual Culture (Brill Academic, 2001). His second book, the working title of which is The Materials of Translation: Subjects and Objects in the first Indo-Persian Polity, deals with the circulation of cultural artifacts between northern India and eastern Iran in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Michael Gilsenan (Middle Eastern Studies and Anthropology, NYU) is currently working on migration of Arab families from south Yemen to South East Asia. His books include Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt: an Essay in the Sociology of Religion(Oxford, 1973); Recognizing Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 1983); and Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in Arab Society (California, 1996).

Faye Ginsburg (Anthropology, Center for Media, Culture, and History, Center for Religion and Media, NYU) is author/editor of four books including the award-winning Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (California, 1989, 98) and most recently Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (California, 2002, with Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin). She is currently completing a decade-long study on the use of modern media in indigenous communities.

Sam Gregory, a video producer, advocacy trainer and human rights activist, is currently the Program Manager at WITNESS. He has worked for development organizations in Nepal and Vietnam. In collaboration with WITNESS partners he has supported video components in advocacy and outreach campaigns on human rights issues in, among other countries, the Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, Honduras, Guatemala, Argentina and the USA.

Stewart M. Hoover (University of Colorado) is a Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a Professor Adjoint of Religious Studies and American Studies. His books include The Electronic Giant (Brethren Press, 1979), Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electronic Church (Sage, 1988) and Religion in the News: Faith and Journalism in American Public Discourse (Sage, 1998) and has co-edited two others, Religious Television: Controversies and Conclusions(Ablex, 1990; with Robert Ableman) and Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture(Sage, 1997; with Knut Lundby).

Louis Kaplan (Fine Art, University of Toronto) is the author of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings (Duke, 1995), and numerous publications in art history, visual culture, photo studies, and Jewish studies. He is currently completing a manuscript on photography and the construction of American communities in the twentieth century to be published by the University of Minnesota Press. Kaplan has collaborated with Melissa Shiff on selected video projects including the real-life performance of their "Avant-Garde Jewish Wedding."

Thomas Keenan (Bard College) is the author of Fables of Responsibility (Stanford University Press 1997), and editor of books on the museum and on the wartime journalism of Paul de Man. His current manuscript is called Live Feed: Crisis, Intervention, Media, about the news media and contemporary conflicts. He is also director of the Human Rights Project at Bard.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Performance Studies, NYU) is the author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (California, 1998). She works on East European Jewish culture and is particularly interested in the history and theory of museums, world's fairs, and tourism.

Brian Larkin (Anthropology, Barnard College at Columbia University) writes on the materiality of media technologies and the relationship between media, urbanization and globalization. He is co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain(California, 2002).

Magnus Marsden (Trinity College, Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge) has, since 1995, focused his research on Islamic thought, identity and disputation in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan. Fieldwork: Visiting and research in Chitral since September 1995. Languages: Khowar, Pashto, Dari. Theoretical interests in emotional and intellectual processes and modes, and morality.

Meg McLagan (Anthropology, NYU) is completing a book manuscript, Skillful Means: Culture, Media, and Transnational Tibet Activism for Princeton University Press. Other publications include "Circuits of suffering" (Political and Legal Anthropology Review, special issue on human rights, forthcoming); "Human rights, testimony, and transnational publicity," (in “Public Sentiments,” a special issue of The Feminist and Scholar Online, 2003;
and "Spectacles of difference: Cultural activism and the mass mediation of Tibet," (in Media Worlds, 2002).

Birgit Meyer (Anthropology, Research Centre Religion and Society, University of Amsterdam) is the author of Translating the Devil. Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh, 1999); Globalization and Identity. Dialectics of Flow and Closure (edited with Peter Geschiere, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); and Magic and Modernity. Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (edited with Peter Pels, Stanford, 2003).

Flagg Miller (Anthropology and Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is in the process of completing a book entitled Resonant Letters: The Moral Authority of Media in Yemeni Audiocassette Poetry, which examines discourses of circulation that engage poets, singers, and audiences as new media technologies are brought to political versification in Yemen. He has published articles in the American Ethnologist, the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the Journal of Women’s History, among other venues.

Ziba Mir-Hosseini is a Research Associate at the London Middle Eastern Institute, SOAS, University of London. In spring 2004 she was Hauser Global Law Visiting Professor at the School of Law, New York University. An anthropologist, she is the author of Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and Morocco(I. B. Tauris, 1993), and Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton University Press, 1999 & I. B. Tauris, 2000), and co-director of two feature-length documentaries: Divorce Iranian Style (1998); and Runaway(2001).

Minoo Moallem (Women's Studies, San Francisco State University) is co-editor of Between Woman and Nation. Nationalisms,Transnational Feminisms and the State(Duke, 1999) and guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, on “Iranian Immigrants, Exiles and Refugees.” Her new book is Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister. Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy (forthcoming. California).

Ann Pellegrini (Religious Studies and Performance Studies, NYU) is the author of several publications including Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, co-editor (Columbia University Press, 2003), Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, co-author (NYU, 2003), and Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997)|.

Miriam Peskowitz (Jewish Studies, Temple University; Reconstructionist Rabbinical College) is the author of Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender and History (California, 1997), and co-editor with Laura Levitt of Judaism Since Gender (Routledge, 1997). She is at work on Travels in the Holy Land, a study of bible land replicas and theme parks in the United States, and is the author of Playground Revolution(forthcoming, Seal Press).

Anne K. Rasmussen (Music and Ethnomusicology, The College of William and Mary) has published in various journals including Ethnomusicology, Asian Music, and Popular Music, and has contributed chapters to several edited volumes. She has produced four compact disc recordings and is co-editor of Musics of Multicultural America (Schirmer, 1997). She is currently at work on a book provisionally titled Women's Voices, the Recited Qur’ân, and Islamic Musical Arts in Indonesia.

Michael Renov (Critical Studies, USC School of Cinema-Television) is the author of Hollywood's Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology (Umi Research, 1988) and The Subject of Documentary (Minnesota, 2004); editor of Theorizing Documentary(Routledge, 1993); and co-editor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices(Minnesota, 1995) and Collecting Visible Evidence (Minnesota, 1999). He is an editor of the Visible Evidence book series for the University of Minnesota Press.

Jay Rosen (Journalism, NYU) is a press critic who, since 1990 has been a leading figure in the reform movement known as public journalism. His books include What Are Journalists For? (Yale, 1999) and the co-edited collection about the terror attacks in New York City, 9/11, 8:48 am: Documenting America’s Greatest Tragedy (Booksurge, 2001).

Renata Salecl (Faculty of Law, Ljubljana, Slovenia; London School of Economics) is the author of The Spoils of Freedom (Routledge, 1994), (Per)versions of Love and hate (Verso, 1998), and On Anxiety (Routledge, 2004). Her work links psychoanalysis with law and cultural theory. Currently, she is working on the book, Tyranny of Choice.

Jeffrey Shandler (Jewish Studies, Rutgers University) is the author of While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford, 1999), the editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale, 2002), and co-author/co-editor (with J. Hoberman) of Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton, 2003). Currently Mr. Shandler is completing a study of Yiddish culture after World War II.

Jeffrey Sharlet, journalist and author, edits The Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion and the Press (therevealer.org), the web magazine of The Center for Religion and Media and the Department of Journalism at NYU. He is founder of the website killingthebuddha.com and co-author of a book (Free Press, 2004) by the same title, with Peter Manseau.

Melissa Shiff is a Toronto based video, performance and installation artist whose video sculpture,“Elijah Chair,” was on display at the Jewish Museum in New York from February through Passover, 2004. Her most recent reinvention of Jewish ritual is the “Chuppah in the Succah” which plays between the Jewish wedding ceremony and avant-garde performance art.

Ella Shohat (Middle Eastern Studies and Art and Public Policy. NYU) has developed critical approaches to the study of Arab-Jews and the Mizrahi. Her award-winning work includes the books Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, (Texas, 1989), Unthinking Eurocentrism (co-authored with R. Stam, Routledge, 1994), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (co-edited, Minnesota, 1997), Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (MIT and the New Museum, 1998), Forbidden Reminiscences (Bimat Kedem, 2001).

Patricia Spyer (Anthropology, Leiden University) is the author of The Memory of Trade: Modernity's Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke, 2000) and editor of Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Places (Routledge, 1998). Her current research focuses on the role of mass and small media in the dynamics of the violence and post-conflict situation in the Moluccas, Indonesia.

Martin Stokes (Music, University of Chicago) is the author of The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey, ed. (Clarendon 1992); Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Berg 1994/7); and Celtic Modern: Music Making at the Global Fringe (editor with Philip Bohlman, Scarecrow 2004). His current project focuses on Turkish vernacular modernisms, media and performance.

Jeremy Stolow (Communication Studies and Sociology. McMaster University, Canada) is a 2003-2004 Visiting Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media, NYU is working on two projects related to religion and media: contemporary Jewish Orthodox publishing; and Spiritualism and electricity in the 19th century.

Leshu Torchin is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU. Her interest in the complexities of witnessing, spectacles of suffering and media technologies fuels her dissertation project, tentatively titled "The Burden of Witnessing: Visual Media, Genocide, and the Production of Empathy."

Benjamin Zimmer (Anthropology, Kenyon College) has written about ideologies of sociolinguistic, ethnic, and religious differentiation at work in the formation of a distinct Sundanese identity. In 2002-03, he was a Ford Foundation fellow of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, funded by the "Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies" initiative.

Angela Zito (Anthropology; Director, Religious Studies, Center for Religion and Media, NYU) has written Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in 18th Century China (Chicago, 1997) and co-edited, with Tani Barlow, Body, Subject and Power in China (Chicago, 1994). Current projects include work on missionary and medical treatments of foot binding and the invention of the universal body of human rights discourse.
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Partial funding for this project has been provided
by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

The Center for Religion and Media seeks to develop interdisciplinary,
cross-cultural knowledge of how religious ideas and practices are shaped and spread through a variety of media. It is a collaborative project of the Religious Studies Program, the Center for Media, Culture and History, and the Department of Journalism.

Center for Religion and Media
Faye Ginsburg, Co-Director
Angela Zito, Co-Director
Barbara Abrash, Associate Director
Kristen A Meinzer, Program Associate
Jay Rosen, Publisher, The Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion and the Press
Jeff Sharlet, Editor, The Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion and the Press

Center for Religion and Media
726 Broadway, Suite 554
New York, New York 10003
telephone 212.998.7608; fax 212.995.
www.nyu.edu/fas/center/religionandmedia