After having gone through years’ worth of blog posts in order to eliminate what we no longer saw as necessary and relevant to our project, I wonder what possible patterns and histories of the department we could have found and been able to tell had we worked with the full initial data set. Computational text […]
continue readingI, Robot… I, Ethical
On my morning drive into work, I heard a news report on autonomous and intelligent road vehicles, or self-driving automobiles. The story explained that as these vehicles are optimized for road safety, designers must determine programming imperatives such as whether a vehicle should prioritize the safety of the human “driver” or a pedestrian in a […]
continue reading#RELHomecoming 2018
This weekend marked REL’s first homecoming bash on the balcony — we sent out invites to all alums for whom we have good mailing addresses and made sure our current majors & minors were in the loop. Our Alumni Liaison committee members were all there, as well as many faculty and staff members. The result? […]
continue readingThe CV: This is Your Life
Since Prof. McCutcheon has offered a couple of posts with advice about the job market, one on campus interviews and one on the process more broadly, I thought I would add a post about another piece of the job market process: the CV. The topic of the CV came up the other day in our […]
continue readingIdentity in Inter-Korean Politics
Jacob Inglis is a junior from Huntsville, Alabama majoring in International Studies and minoring in Korean, Asian Studies, and the Randall Research Scholars Program with an interest in Inter-Korean politics and diplomacy. The world watched over the past year as war on the Korean Peninsula, an inevitable outcome according to North Korea, seemed poised to […]
continue readingOutside the Box
On the flight home from a visit to Lehigh University this past week I started reading Steven Johnson’s engaging How We Got to Now (2014) — a popularly-written book on the conditions and unanticipated connections that helped to make possible the innovations that many of us now take for granted (e.g., public sanitation or refrigeration).
continue readingIs This Really a College Town?
The label “college town” can produce a variety of expectations. Having spent several years attending UNC Chapel Hill, my expectations of a college town derive from some specific observations. When I traveled to Ithaca, New York, at the end of September to participate in Cornell University’s South Asia Program Seminar, the plane trip heightened my […]
continue readingThe Category Religion — Twenty Years Later
I’ve got a review essay coming out in 2015 in Numen (issue 62/1) that I just proofed. It’s on recent works concerned with the category religion. It was interesting to write, since it’s been twenty years since I wrote a similar essay on the category religion in scholarship.
continue readingCreate Your Own Identity
On Oct. 23, a “hatchet-wielding” man attacked and wounded several police officers in New York City (Queens). Naturally, media outlets immediately started speculating about what could have prompted this man to carry out such a horrific attack. According to several accounts, the man was a recent convert to Islam who had “self-radicalized.” The New York […]
continue readingThe Imagined Kashmir
Anna Davis is a junior from Prattville, Alabama who is majoring in Geography and Religious Studies. She wrote this post as part of Dr. Steven Ramey’s course, REL 321: Religion & Identity in South Asia The geographic area of South Asia has experienced a catastrophic series of floods in recent weeks. The region of Kashmir […]
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