For precise schedule of offerings see department catalog during pre-enrollment week each semester.

There are many practicing historians of religion, but little consensus on what might be distinctive about the "history of religion" per se. On the face of it, this is unusual. Historians of science, for example, not only have science as their subject, but have also developed methods to their subject, and a canon of key texts, that orient teaching and research in the field in important ways. Religion seems no less a distinctive and unusual object than science, yet its historians seem quite content simply to proceed in their work with methodological abandon, as if writing the history of religion was a self-evident pursuit. Put a different way, historians of early modern Christianity rarely imagine themselves to be part of the same field as historians of medieval Islam, ancient Buddhism, or modern African American Christianity. Why not? And should they? This course proposes a) to examine how this state of affairs came to be, with particular reference to the history of "religion" as an object of scholarly inquiry; and b) to begin to frame in more concrete ways whether and how the history of religion might be understood as a project demanding its own distinctive protocols, with a distinctive pedagogical canon, and a distinctive research agenda.

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