There is still time to submit a proposal for a paper at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting, scheduled to be held November 20-23, 2021 in San Antonio, Texas (or ….maybe online?).
The deadline for submission is March 8.
The AAR’s Religion in Europe unit analyzes religion in both Eastern and Western Europe or related to Europe in any historical period. It is
designed to serve as a forum for the examination of religious issues related to the social, cultural, and political development of both Eastern and Western Europe. Its guiding principles include a commitment to scholarly dialogue across disciplines, a comparative spirit sensitive to Europe’s religious diversity, and a transhistorical appreciation of the full trajectory of the European experience.
For the conference, the unit encourages “interdisciplinary, interreligious, and comparative approaches, and [it] particularly welcome[s] submissions from members of underrepresented groups in the Academy.”
It notes several thematic possibilities that would involve Jewish built heritage:
- The role of sacred places in contemporary European society and culture. Responses toward sacred places often reveal unarticulated attitudes toward the place and role of religious minorities and implicit frames of reference toward debates on religion and secularism. We seek papers that reflect on particular sacred sites, including their symbolic, material, and theoretical dimensions; programs and practices toward protecting, preserving, and/or mythologizing sacred places and religious heritage; practices of pilgrimage, with special reference to the new realities of brought on by COVID travel restrictions; and new frameworks for reflecting on the role of sacred places in 21st century European society and culture.
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Announcement of closure in 2016 of Cork synagogue, which was concerted into a 7th Day Adventist church The changes in the religious landscape in Ireland over the past century, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the end of the Irish War of Independence (1921). We are especially looking for papers that address any of the following themes: overall changes in the religious landscape of Ireland and Northern Ireland over the past century; the relationship of Irish religious culture and traditions to the political relationship of Ireland with the UK and/or Brexit; the relationship of religion, and especially the Catholic Church, to politics of gender and/or abortion in Ireland; or, for a comparative panel, the way other traditionally Catholic European countries have navigated similar politics of gender and/or abortion.
- Shifting religious identities in Europe, historical or contemporary, especially as related to patterns of (im)migration; ethno-religious identity dynamics; and/or national, nationalist, or populist discourses concerning religion, national identity, ethnicity, race, immigration, or similar.
Click here for the Religion in Europe section of the conference web site and full details