Call for Proposals

This Section gives strong preference to paper sessions (not panel sessions). Proposals for paper sessions should include specific titles and proposals for each paper included in the session. We give preference to proposals for entire sessions over individual papers and accept few individual paper proposals. The following topics for sessions have been suggested by Section members. Please contact listed organizers if you wish to take part in any proposed session. Where no organizer is identified, we welcome someone to take on that role. Suggested themes are:

• Borderlands religion (Laurie Louise Patton, Emory University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• Reflections on the religion in South Asia Section’s early years (John E. Cort, Denison University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• The limits of royal religious patronage (Jon Keune, University of Göttingen, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• Contemporary iterations of the Kali Yuga (Amy L. Allocco, Elon University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• Considering and invoking the powers of ascetics (Ian Wilson, Syracuse University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• Aesthetics and South Asian religion (Amy P. Langenberg, Auburn University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• Bollywood and religion (Ellen Goldberg, Queen’s University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• Syncretisms in South and Southeast Asia (Tazim R. Kassam, Syracuse University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• New methodologies in the ethnography of South Asian religions (Nicole Karapanagiotis, Georgia Southern University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• Medieval Bhakti traditions in Kannada and Telugu literatures (Gil Ben-Herut, Emory University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• Cognitive research and the study of religions in South Asia (Travis Chilcott, Iowa State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• The symbolic and the real in Hindu religions
• Divine and human consecration ceremonies
• Politics in South Asian religions (Nawaraj Chaulagain, Harvard University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Mission

This Section’s mission is to provide a venue for new and important research in the many religious cultures, texts, and histories of South Asia. Within the area of South Asia, all world religions exist in unique forms, from religions that originated in India — such as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Tantra, and tribal religions — to religions that have taken on longstanding and distinctive forms in South Asia — such as Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. The focus of our work is thus on a geographical area; the religious, cultural, and intellectual traditions of that area; and changes that have occurred in those traditions over several millennia. Scholars of South Asia explore the distinctive manifestations of religious traditions in the subcontinent, their interactions, and their movements to and expressions in other parts of the world. This Section encourages contextualizing religion within debates on a broad array of parallel and intersecting issues, such as (but not limited to) politics, secularism, literature, philology, globalization, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, history, society, media, popular culture, material and visual culture, and economics. The scholarship we sponsor at the Annual Meeting often emphasizes sessions and papers that look at more than one tradition and thus frequently entail some degree of comparative approach. Our website is www.montclair.edu/RISA. We also have a listserv, which is essential to the work of our Section. Information on joining the listserv can be found on our website.

Anonymity of Review Process

Proposals are anonymous to Chairs and steering committee members during review, but visible to Chairs prior to final acceptance or rejection.

Questions?

Donald R. Davis
University of Wisconsin, Madison
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

M. Whitney Kelting
Northeastern University
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Method of Submission