Friday, April 5, 2024

• 3:30 PM - 4:00 PM: Arrival & Registration
   
• 4:00 PM - 4:15 PM: Welcome & Opening Remarks (Stephen Bush, Chair of Religious Studies)
   
• 4:15 PM - 5:45 PM: Panel 1: What Comes Next? Liberatory Potentialities
  • Student Chair: Jennifer Greenberg
  • Lilia Ellis (U Chicago), “Wholeness of Gender: Hildegard's Implications for Transgender Eschatology”
  • Jesse Noily (U Chicago), “"Your Dew is the Dew of Morning": Rabbinic Eschatology and the Erotics of Resurrection”
  • Rebekah Rosenfeld (U Chicago), “Cripistemologies and the Eternity of the Mind”
  • Katie Mahowski Mylroie (Boston College), “A Comparative Theology of Death: How Kali can reaffirm Christian contemplation of death”
  • Respondent: Daniel Vaca, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
     
• 5:45 PM - 6:00 PM: Break
   
• 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM: Opening Keynote - Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, “Sex Unburdened: Augustine, Foucault, and the Transfigured Body.”

Saturday, April 6, 2024

• 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM: Breakfast
   
• 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM: Panel 2: Explorations in Materiality and Temporality
  • Student Chair: Donnell Williamson
  • Devanney Haruta (Brown), “Piano (de)composition and Instrumental Afterlife”
  • Victoria Basug Slabinski (U Virginia), “Memory, Homeplaces, and the (After)Lives of Queer Feminist Ancestors”
  • Zhujun Ma (Brown), “Were Mothers Doomed? Reinterpreting Motherhood in the Paratexts of the Blood Bowl Hell Sutra In Early Modern China”
  • Shuangxia Wu (Brown), “Nested Memory: The Past, Present, and After-lives of a Journal Article”
  • Respondent: Stephen Bush, Professor of Religious Studies
     
• 11:00 AM - 11:15 AM: Break
   
• 11:15 AM - 12:45 PM:  Panel 3: Ties, Ruptures, and Continuities 
  • Student Chair: Daniel Bate
  • Joshua Wagner (U Chicago), “Stylish Silences: Quaker Eschatology, Prosodic Theology, and Utopian Margins”
  • Constantine Lignos (Columbia), “The Dancing Deity of Death: Becoming Familiar with the Intermediate States (Bardo) Through Tibetan Buddhist Tantric Dance (Cham)”
  • Zachary Taylor (U Chicago), “The Afterlife of Sullied Souls: Prayer and Purgatory in Roman Catholicism”
  • Shreya Maini (Duke), “Death and Deathlessness in C.V.V. Yoga”
  • Respondent: Jae Han, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies 
     
• 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM: Lunch
   
• 1:45 PM - 3:15 PM: Panel 4: Mourning
  • Student Chair: Tim Gilmartin
  • Victoria Berges (Boston College), “An Ignatian Approach to Continuing Bonds with the Dead for Grief Therapy”
  • Charlie Grant (U Chicago), “Witness and Descent in Spiritual Care”
  • Elizabeth Berman (Brown), “Physician-Assisted Suicide Beyond Bioethics”
  • Franklin Joyce (U Chicago), “Hamlet: A Study in Mourning”
  • Respondent: Susan Harvey, Professor of History & Religion 
     
• 3:15 PM - 3:30 PM: Coffee break
   
• 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM: Panel 5: Liminality and the Otherwise 
  • Student Chair: Rhitama Basak
  • Atikah Adzhar (U Chicago), “Uncanny Saints and Pilgrims: Altering Temporalities at a Kazakhstan Islamic Shrine”
  • Meena Venkataramanan (Brown), ““Black at Heart”: Asian Americans and Spectral Whiteness in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Tuff”
  • Emily Dupuis (Boston college), “Magic, Myth, and Memory: Rural Gaelic Catholicism”
  • Respondent: Shahzad Bashir, Prof of Islamic Humanities, History, & Religious Studies

• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM: Break

• 5:15 PM - 6:45 PM: Closing Keynote - Niloofar Haeri, “The Afterlife of Religion: The Islamic Revolution in Iran”
   
• 7:30 PM: Dinner for participants at Flatbread Pizza (161 Cushing Street, Providence).

Downloadable program