We offer a broad and diverse undergraduate curriculum focusing on the intertwined relationship between religion and politics across U.S. history, from the colonial era to the present. We also support early career scholars with fellowships that offer teaching and research opportunities at the Center.
Courses
Our courses range widely in topics, but all focus on the cultivation of research and interpretive skills necessary for analyzing and responding to issues that shape society and culture in the United States.
Gateway Courses
Gateway courses are required for the minor in religion and politics and serve as an introduction to the field of study.
This course traces how conceptions of “religion” and “the state” changed in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the dawn of a new millennium.
This course investigates the intersections of the law and the social history of religious freedom in America. It examines issues such as constitutional principles of religious freedom and the rights of religious groups to dissent, from America’s founding to the present.
Please check back soon for a gateway course offering!
Please check below for our other course offerings this semester. Read more about gateway courses and the undergraduate minor in religion and politics here.
Our courses cover a wide spectrum of topics related to the intersection of American religion and politics both historically and in the present. Select a semester to see our most recent course offerings or scroll to the bottom to view past courses.
This course pursues two major lines of inquiry in modern Western political thought: the relation between the individual and the state, and the means of holding state power accountable.
This course traces how conceptions of “religion” and “the state” changed in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the dawn of a new millennium.
This course introduces students to the history of religion and politics in America from the English settlements of Virginia and Massachusetts Bay during the early seventeenth century through the constitutional debates of the 1780s.
This course examines the phenomenon of Islamophobia as a form of anti-Muslim racism as it has manifested throughout U.S. history and within contemporary American politics.
This course explores a variety of topics relating to American religious holidays and civic rituals such as African-American emancipation celebrations, public battles over Christmas, evangelical enactments of Halloween Hell Houses, Roman Catholic street festivals, modern renderings of Hanukkah, as well as the memorialization of the Union and the Confederacy.
This course investigates the intersections of the law and the social history of religious freedom in America. It examines issues such as constitutional principles of religious freedom and the rights of religious groups to dissent, from America’s founding to the present.
This course examines how particular understandings of religion, race, and migration inform contemporary scholarship and shape national and international legal and governmental practices.
What does theology have to do with politics? This course attempts to answer that question by reading and discussing important texts from the western Christian tradition and investigating what they have to say about issues such as political revolution, loyalties to the nation, economic policy, gender, and race.
Investigates how gender and sexuality inform social, political, and family life in diverse Islamic contexts, spanning from seventh century Arabia to the contemporary U.S.
This course explores not only how religious configurations and economic practices co-constitute each other in the field of American religions, but also critiques of capitalism, especially by attending to the notion of gendered racial capitalism.
This course explores the sexual abuse crisis in North American Christianity, both as it has emerged in the media and as church leaders and laypeople have responded to it. We’ll pay particular attention to the power dynamics of abuse, the impact upon the Christian body writ large, and the relation between the crisis and U.S. politics.
This seminar focuses on the formation of “spirituality” in American culture from the Transcendentalist world of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman on through more recent expressions of the “spiritual-but-not-religious” sensibility.
What is political about a day of rest? This seminar will explore the practice of the Jewish Sabbath and arguments by Jews and non-Jews for its political potential as a critical break from regular forms of life, “the other six days” in which we work and live.
