Teaching Fellow under Professor David Holland, Harvard Divinity School

Unlike many humanistic disciplines, the study of religion does not invoke a particular method to examine a variety of subjects (e.g., as in history, or anthropology, or sociology). Rather, the study of religion has used a variety of methods to examine a particular subject, and it has developed an array of theoretical arguments about the nature of that subject. This course is designed to help students consider that subject, those methods and the challenging theoretical concerns that circulate around them. Because the field of religion is vast—in its sources and its approaches—no semester-long course can be comprehensive. But this curriculum aims to introduce some of the most pressing conversations about the category of religion and some of the most frequently used methods for examining it.