December 21 2024

AAR Graduate Student Committee

An Open Letter from the AAR Graduate Student Committee, Part 1

Russell T. McCutcheon
University of Alabama

In 2023, the AAR tasked the Academic Relations Committee (ARC), of which I’m now chair, with developing a resource for those in leadership positions within a department, especially those new to such roles as chair, graduate director, undergraduate director, and even advisor. These are all positions of central importance in managing life within an academic department, whether helping a new faculty member come onboard or directing students to the correct courses to satisfy their degree requirements. But given the times in which we’re now living—when it is not unusual to learn each month of yet another Humanities program being merged or even whole sectors of a college’s traditional liberal arts programs being closed—it was reasoned that the resource should ideally also help faculty to think through how to cope when working in precarious settings (which can be more often than not). Has the Gen Ed or Core program been revised on your campus, like so many others in the past few years?

Interview with Megan Brankley Abbas

Megan Brankley Abbas joins Kristian Petersen to discuss her award-winning book Whose Islam?: The Western University and Modern Islamic Thought in Indonesia (Stanford University Press). Abbas's book "thoughtfully discusses the question of authority in Islamic studies, both religious and academic, infusing the insider-outsider debate with new empirical evidence and profound insights." 

Interview with Gloria Maité Hernández

Gloria Maité Hernández joins Kristian Petersen to discuss her award-winning book Savoring God: Comparative Theopoetics (Oxford University Press). Hernández's book "bridges time, linguistic difference (Spanish and Sanskrit), religious orientations (Catholicism and Hinduism), as well as mystical personalities and temperaments (John of the Cross and the Rasa Lila)." 

Interview with Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh joins Kristian Petersen to discuss her award-winning book The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (The University of North Carolina Press). Wells-Oghoghomeh's book "tackles an impossible issue—giving a reckoning of the interior religious lives of enslaved women in the American South—and does so with breathtaking finesse."

Interview with Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm joins Kristian Petersen to discuss his award-winning book Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (The University of Chicago Press). Storm's book is "a theoretical tour de force" that "charts a path forward to avoid the pitfalls, yet absorb the insights, of prominent theoretical and methodological strands that shaped the modern sciences and postmodern humanities."

Interview with Kathryn R. Barush

Kathryn R. Barush joins Kristian Petersen to discuss her award-winning book Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience (Bloomsbury Publishing). Expanding the concepts of “pilgrimage” and art as lived experience, Barush's book extends the idea of communities as culture. 

Interview with Adam Lyons

Adam Lyons joins Kristian Petersen to discuss his award-winning book Karma and Punishment: Prison Chaplaincy in Japan (Harvard University Press). Interdisciplinary in its orientation that seamlessly blends in-depth fieldwork with meticulous archival research, Lyons' book is a profound meditation on the relationship between carcerality, religion, and the modern State.

Interview by Nichole Phillips

An interview between Emily Gravett, 2023 Katie Geneva Cannon Excellence in Teaching Award Winner, and Nichole Phillips, chair of AAR Committee on Teaching and Learning

Namdrol Miranda Adams

Namdrol Miranda Adams discusses the state of Buddhist theological education, gleaning insights from two leading contemporary Buddhist scholars. 

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