23 courses with the subject RELI, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
RELI 1120001/13113 M W 10:10am - 11:25am Gil Anidjar 4.00 30/30
602 Northwest Corner RELI UN1610 RELIGION AND POPULAR CULTURE. 3.00 points. When we hear “pop culture,” we often think of it in comparison to a “high culture.” In reality, popular culture is something that everyone has easy access to, and represents a common language of the people. Religion permeates American popular culture in surprising ways, and is part of national vocabulary. In addition, religious communities turn to popular culture as a way to preserve their own identities and uniqueness in the face of homogenization and assimilation. The course will attempt to cover a diversity of voices and perspectives. It is important to understand how context plays a role in the interpretation and practice of faith, as well as to witness the tension between the theology and the manifestation of belief. We are not interested in determining if a particular understanding is right or wrong. Rather, we want to understand the role religion plays in society and for the individual. You will be expected to be critical and engaged. My hope is that you will also be creative and daring, and push us all into a better understanding of the material Fall 2025: RELI UN1610 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrol
RELI 1610001/00452 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm Hussein 3.00 25/30
324 Milbank Hall Rashid Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 571 RELI BC2003 Religion and Political Thought. 3.00 points. Are “belief” and “reason” two different things? What is the proper role of religion in modern society? How do we determine what is just and unjust in the absence of a Higher Law? Does religion continue to influence political decision-making in liberal democracies, and if so, how? These questions continue to animate debates about the relationship between religion and politics today. This class examines articulations of and responses to this question in the political thought of the Enlightenment, a period that has traditionally been described as the moment when “the West” parted ways with religion and religious belief as the foundation for its understanding of truth, justice, and social order. In this class, we will examine classic and overlooked works of Enlightenment philosophy. We will interrogate whether the Enlightenment really signaled a departure from religion. We will also examine whether the Enlightenment was the preserve — much less the invention — of white Europeans and American settlers. We will do so with an eye toward the politics of the present, examining how Enlightenment thought’s engagement with religion produced discourses of race, gender, economy, and nationhood that continue to shape the terms of political discourse today Fall 2025: RELI BC2003 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
RELI 2003001/00453 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm Timothy 3.00 20/38
307 Milbank Hall Vasko RELI UN2305 ISLAM. 4.00 points. CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement An introduction to the Islamic religion in its premodern and modern manifestations. The first half of the course concentrates on “classical” lment Islam, beginning with the life of the Prophet, and extending to ritual, jurisprudence, theology, and mysticism. The second half examines how Muslims have articulated Islam in light of colonization and the rise of a secular modernity. The course ends with a discussion of American and European Muslim attempts at carving out distinct spheres of identity in the larger global Muslim community Fall 2025: RELI UN2305 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
RELI 2205001/11599 M W 10:10am - 11:25am Dominique 4.00 80/9
428 Pupin Laboratories Townsend RELI UN2309 HINDUISM. 4.00 points. CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement Considers efforts since 1900 to synthesize a coherent understanding of what Hinduism entails, sometimes under the heading of sanatana dharma. Using a rubric provided by the Bhagavad Gita, explores philosophical/theological (jnana), ritual (karma), and devotional (bhakti) aspects of Hindu life and thought Fall 2025: RELI UN2309 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enro
RELI 2309001/00014 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm Meghan 4.00 56/6
418 Barnard Hall Hartman Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 139 ASCM UN2357 INTRO TO INDIAN CIVILIZATION. 4.00 points. CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement Introduction to Indian civilization with attention to both its unity and its diversity across the Indian subcontinent. Consideration of its origins, formative development, fundamental social institutions, religious thought and practice (Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh), literary and artistic achievements, and modern challenges. Students must register for a section of ASCM UN2358 Fall 2025: ASCM UN2357 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
RELI 2388003/16996 Th 2:00pm - 2:50pm Gabriella Lee 0.00 20/20
703 Hamilton Hall RELI UN2405 CHINESE RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS. 4.00 points. CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement This course provides a chronological and thematic introduction to Chinese religions from their beginnings until modern times. It examines distinctive concepts, practices and institutions in the religions of China. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity and unity of religious expressions in China, with readings drawn from a wide-range of texts: religious scriptures, philosophical texts, popular literature and modern historical and ethnographic studies. Special attention will be given to those forms of religion common to both “elite” and “folk” culture: cosmology, family and communal rituals, afterlife, morality and mythology. The course also raises more general questions concerning gender, class, political patronage, and differing concepts of religion Spring 2026: RELI UN2405 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollmen
RELI 2779001/00201 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm Nathan 3.00 14/18
324 Milbank Hall Blackwell RELI UN2780 INTRODUCTION TO NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS- Discussion. 0.00 points. REQUIRED DISCUSSION SECTION FOR RELI UN2779 RELI UN3023 Digital Religion: Analyzing, Digitizing, and Mapping. 3.00 points. This course courses engages the interdisciplinary study of religion online and provides practical training to students on developing digital humanities projects, in partnership with the Digital Humanities Center and the Empirical Reasoning Center, and will incorporate analysis and critical reflection into their research on religious communities. The first portion of the course focuses on understanding methodologies in studying digital religion and exploring religious communities online. Case studies focus on ascriptive and affirmative identifications of t religious communities, including how religious communities use online space to redefine their public perceptions. The latter part of the course utilizes tools of digital humanities to develop projects responsive to student interests and that allows them to analyze digital expressions of religion Spring 2026: RELI UN3023 t Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
RELI 3023001/00919 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm Hussein 3.00 24/30
140 Horace Mann Hall Rashid RELI UN3027 Muslims of New York. 3.00 points. Looking at both historical and lived realities of Muslims in NYC, moving from the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan to Harlem as Mecca. The course would engage both with cultural production, such as music, plays, and street art, and living communities around the
RELI 3027001/00772 M W 10:10am - 11:25am Hussein 3.00 24/30
302 Milbank Hall Rashid ECON BC3029 EMPIRICAL APPROACHES DEVLPMNT. 3.00 points. ECON BC3035 or ECON BC3033, or permission of the instructor. Examination of new challenges in the global economy from unequal income distribution and poor institutions to health epidemics and natural disasters. Accessing and analyzing real-time and historic data to understand the current global economy. Applied econometric techniques. HIST UN3030 IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP IN AMER HIST. 4.00 t points. This course explores the meaning of American citizenship in connection with the country’s immigration history. Topics include historic pathways to citizenship for migrants; barriers to citizenship including wealth, race, gender, beliefs and documentation; and critical issues such as colonialism, statelessness, dual nationality, and birthright citizenship. We will ask how have people become citizens and under what authority has that citizenship been granted? What are the historic barriers to citizenship and how have they shifted over time? What major questions remain unanswered by Congress and the t Supreme Court regarding the rights of migrants to attain and retain
RELI 3210001/00457 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm Elizabeth 3.00 16/32
Ll001 Milstein Center Castelli Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 573 RELI UN3314 QURAN. 4.00 points. This course conceives of the Qur’ān as a living text in constant flux through interactions with other religious traditions. It focuses on developing an understanding of the Qur’ān’s form, style, and content through a close reading of comparable religious texts. Major topics covered include the Qur’ānic theory of prophecy, its treatment of the Biblical tradition (both that of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament), and its perspective on pre-Islamic pagan religion. The central goals of the course include the ability to (a) analyze primary religious sources in a critical and objective manner and (b) construct coherent arguments based on concrete evidence. In a class of this nature, class members will naturally hold or develop a wide variety of opinions about the topics covered. The goal is not to adopt a single opinion concerning the interpretation of a particular text, but rather to support personal conclusions in a clear logical manner Spring 2026: RELI UN3314 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
RELI 3314001/00675 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm Hussein 4.00 28/30
307 Milbank Hall Rashid RELI UN3323 Religion and Medicine in South Asia: Psychiatry # the Politics of Madness. 4.00 points. In this course, students will come to see the imbrication of religion, power, and mental illness across South Asia by examining experiences of suffering and its management; the history of psychiatry in the British colonial era and its afterlives; and the relationship of religion to concepts of mental and emotional disorder. Students will identify t models for medical structures of care, healing, and treatments in the context of religion, ritual, and quotidian life. Topics include diagnostic processes and the creation of categories, stigma and models of clinical care, hysteria, spirit possession, pharmaceuticals, and the relationship of trauma to political structures. This course has three sections: 1) the first portion undertakes a brief historical survey of medical disciplines and institutions in South Asia (such as the development of Ayurveda, Yunānī #ibb, and the rise of the bīmāristān); 2) the second portion of the course focuses on the rise of the asylum (sometimes called the pāgal khāna) in tandem with psychiatry and its twinned consequence: the pathologization of asceticism by British colonial t technologies of discipline; 3) the final portion examines the relationship between British colonialism and psychoanalysis with the introduction of this western discipline to the subcontinent. This course will take critical stock of historical structures throughout South Asia claiming t to provide care (such as family, caste, healthcare, mental asylums, colonialism, educational systems, pensions, and much more). As a result, students come to consider concepts of social suffering, biopolitics, biosociality, political subjectivity, and postcolonial disorder. Primary source material will include the following: śāstra, ethnography, clinical studies, poetry, scripture, ritual texts across Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions Spring 2026: RELI UN3323 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
RELI 3604001/10469 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm Courtney 3 5/30
103c 80 Claremont Bender RELI UN3771 Indigenous Enlightenment. 4.00 points. What is the source of truth and authority? What is the origin of the world and how does that determine the social order? Who ought to rule, why, and how? What are the standards for measuring justice and injustice? What is our relationship to the environment around us and how should its resources be distributed among people? How do we relate to those who are different from us, and what does it mean to be a community in the first place? Historically, the answers to these questions that have been described as “religious” and “political” have been the restricted to a specific tradition of Western European Christianity and its secular afterlives. However, these are questions that every society asks, in order to be a society in the first place. This course analyzes how indigenous peoples in the Americas asked and answered these questions through the first three centuries of Western European imperial rule. At the same time, this course pushes students to question what gets categorized as uniquely “indigenous” thought, how, and why. Spring 2026: RELI UN3771 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollmen
RELI 4616001/14955 Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm David Kittay 4.00 15/2
201 80 Claremont RELI GU4637 TALMUDIC NARRATIVE. 4.00 points. This course examines the rich world of Talmudic narrative and the way it mediates between conflicting perspectives on a range of topics: life and death; love and sexuality; beauty and superficiality; politics and legal theory; religion and society; community and non-conformity; decision-making and the nature of certainty. While we examine each text closely, we will consider different scholars’ answers – and our own answers – to the questions, how are we to view Talmudic narrative generally, both as literature and as cultural artifact? Fall 2025: RELI GU4637 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enro
RELI V3630Religion and Black Popular Cultures. 3 points
As an exploration of the relationship between religion, race, and popular culture, the course will begin with theoretical readings that expose students to a variety of definitions of and approaches to each of these categories. After tackling these theoretical concerns, the remainder of the course will entail a cross genre and thematic engagement with the terrain of black popular culture(s) in which students will be challenged to apply new theoretical resources in order to interpret a wide range of "religious" phenomena.
Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. This course explores the religious aspects of race and slavery from the Bible through the abolition of slavery in and around the Enlightenment, ending in the post-colonial era. The focus is mostly on the Atlantic World.
