Scheer Monique - Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations

Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions

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Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions

European Configurations

Edited By
Monique Scheer, Nadia Fadil and
Birgitte Schepelern Johansen

Katie Aston is a Research Associate at Newman University, Birmingham. She was recently awarded funding by the Understanding Unbelief project to research secular and non-religious beliefs about dying and the end of life. Her research interests span material culture, art, cartoons, secularism, atheism, humanism and ritual practices, within the disciplines of sociology, cultural studies and anthropology.

Marian Burchardt is Professor of Sociology at the University of Leipzig. He is currently studying how nation states and urban actors regulate cultural differences and public space and how these regulations affect the practices, socialities and subjectivities of ordinary citizens. He is completing a monograph on the impact of nationalism on religious diversity.

Judith Dehail is Associate Professor in Aesthetics and Cultural Mediation in the Department of Arts at Aix-Marseille University and is affiliated with the Laboratoire dEtude en Sciences des Arts. Her research interests include the mediation of knowledge and art in museums and the practices of museum visitors and library users.

Matthew Engelke is Professor in the Department of Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, at Columbia University. An anthropologist of religion, he is the author of three books and is currently working on a monograph concerning humanist funerals in London.

Nadia Fadil is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the IMMRC (Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre), the University of Leuven. She works on Islam in Europe, both as a living tradition and as an object of governmental regulation and societal debate. More broadly, her theoretical interests pertain to questions of subjectivity and power, ethical selfhood, embodiment and affect, post-colonialism, race and secularism.

Mar Griera is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona, and Director of the research group on sociology of religion (ISOR). She has published extensively on issues of religious minorities, public policies and national identity.

Stacey Gutkowski is Senior Lecturer in Conflict Studies in the Department of War Studies, Kings College London. She is Co-Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Divided Societies there and Co-Director of the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network. Her work interrogates the relationships between war, peace, religion and the secular in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, the United States and the United Kingdom. She is the author of Secular War: Myths of Religion, Politics and Violence (I.B. Tauris, 2013).

Pamela E. Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion, cross-appointed to Anthropology, at the University of Toronto, where she is also Vice-Dean, Undergraduate and International in the Faculty of Arts and Science. Her most recent publications are The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionarys Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State (University of Chicago Press, 2018), co-authored with Paul Christopher Johnson and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan.

Carolin Kosuch is a historian and religious studies scholar currently working as a postdoc researcher at the German Historical Institute in Rome. She is the author of a book on German-Jewish anarchists, Missratene Shne. Anarchismus und Sprachkritik im Fin de Sicle (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), and her current project is a comparative cultural history of cremation.

Lois Lee is Research Fellow at University of Kent. Her research interests centre on the nature of the existential in modernity, with an empirical focus on non-religious populations. She is the author of Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Claudia Liebelt is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at Bayreuth University. Her current research and teaching pertain to gendered notions of beauty and aesthetic body modification in Turkey, extending to questions of normativity, intimacy, class, embodiment, secularism and Islam. Among her recent publications is an edited collection Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Karsten Lichau is a research scholar at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. His research interests include the historical anthropology of the body and the senses, with a special focus on sound history and the history of emotions. He has published on the social and cultural history of the face, and, more recently, on the role of sound, emotion and religion in staging politics.

Graldine Mossire is an anthropologist and Professor at the Institut dtudes religieuses at the University of Montreal. Her research interests include religious diversity, religious mobility, spirituality and healing, new believing subjectivities as well as the researchers subjectivity in the field. The author of Converties lIslam, Parcours de femmes en France et au Qubec (University of Montreal Press, 2013), she is currently heading ethnographic projects on various dimensions of conversion.

Monique Scheer is Professor of Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tbingen, where she also serves as Vice-President for International Affairs. She has co-authored Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling (Oxford University Press, 2014) and is currently completing a monograph on the cultural history of enthusiasm.

Birgitte Schepelern Johansen is Associate Professor at the Institute for Cross Cultural and Regional Studies, Migration Studies and Minority Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her most recent publication is Hate, Politics, Law (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-edited with Thomas Brudholm.

Jennifer A. Selby is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and affiliate member of Gender Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Her research considers Islam in contemporary France and Canada, focusing on secularization theory, Muslim studies and gender. She has recently published Beyond Accommodation: Everyday Narratives of Muslim Canadians (with A. Barras and Lori G. Beaman, University of British Columbia Press, 2018).

Riem Spielhaus is Professor of Islamic Studies with a focus on education and cultures of knowledge at the Georg-August-Universitt Gttingen and a department head at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research. Her most recent publications focus on knowledge production on Muslims in Europe and Islamic practice in Germany.

This edited volume was prepared by an authors workshop held in February 2016 at the University of Tbingen, Germany. We are grateful for the generous support of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the University of Tbingen for the organization of this workshop. We would also like to thank the keynote speakers Pamela Klassen, Matthew Engelke, Rebbeka Habermas and Charles Hirschkind as well as all the participants at the workshop for contributing to the highly stimulating discussions which took place there. All the volumes contributions profited from this initial conversation, as well as from the very incisive comments from anonymous reviewers, whom we thank for the time they took for their careful readings. We would also like to express our thanks to Lalle Pursglove and her team at Bloomsbury for shepherding this project to publication.