“Who Owns Religion?”
next event in the Interdisciplinary Workshop in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
Welcome back former Emory faculty member and current President of Middlebury College, Dr. Laurie L. Patton, (an expert on South Asia and Hinduism) to discuss her new book “Who Owns Religion? Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century.”
Dr. Lynne Huffer (WGSS), Dr. James B. Hoesterey (Religion) and Dr. Walter S. Melion (Art History and FCHI) will initiate the discussion, and the event will be moderated by Dr. Gyan Pandey (History).
Please note the special time and location for this event:
Tuesday, February 25. 4:00-6:00 pm, in the Ackerman Room, on the third floor of the Carlos Museum.
The event is co-sponsored by the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, the Carlos Museum, and the Department of Religion, Emory University.
In Who Owns Religion? (2019), Dr. Patton focuses on a period—the late 1980s through the 1990s—when scholars of religion were accused of denigrating the very communities they had imagined themselves honoring through their work. These controversies, she shows, were fundamentally about something new: the very rights of secular, Western scholarship to interpret religions at all. Her book holds out hope that scholars can find a space for their work between the university and the communities they study. Scholars of religion, she argues, have multiple masters and must move between them while writing histories and speaking about realities that not everyone may be interested in hearing.
