Symposium - Women and Goddesses in Jainism
2025-05-23 14:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Hershey Hall Salon, 801 Hilgard Av, Los Angeles, 90095, United States
Photo credit: Samyak Modi

Throughout the history of Jainism, one of the world’s oldest living religions, Jain women have played a crucial role. Jain renouncers, whose self-denying lifestyle is revered as the highest ideal, are predominantly female, while Jain laywomen tend to be significantly more religiously active than their male counterparts. In this symposium, speakers will provide a range of perspectives on human and divine womanhood in Jain life and thought. Talks will cover the definition of gender in Jain philosophical texts, Jain goddess-worship and changing gender roles in the contemporary Jain diaspora.
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Directions to event venue – Hershey Hall Salon, Room 158
SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE:
2:00 – 2:05: Welcome and introduction, Anahita Hoose (UCLA), symposium organizer & moderator
2:05 – 2:45: Ana Bajželj (UC Riverside): Defining Gender in Śvetāmbara Texts
2:45 – 3:30: Venu Mehta (Claremont School of Theology): Reconceptualizing “Goddess” in Jainism: Devotional Practices for the Jain Goddess Padmāvatī among the Śvetāmbar Mūrtipūjak Jains in Gujarat
3:30 – 3:45: Break
3:45 – 4:30: Shivani Bothra (Cal State Long Beach): Spiritual Equality or Social Boundaries: Redefining Gender Roles in Diasporic Jainism
4:30 – 5:00: Concluding Discussion

SYMPOSIUM PRESENTERS AND DESCRIPTIONS OF THEIR PAPERS:

Ana Bajželj is Associate Professor and Shrimad Rajchandra Endowed Chair in Jain Studies in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of California, Riverside. She was previously a research fellow at the University of Rajasthan and the Polonsky Academy (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), and she taught at the University of Ljubljana and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on Jain philosophy, particularly metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of mind. She is the author of The Nature of Change in Jaina Philosophy (Ljubljana University Press, 2016, in Slovenian) and the co-author of Insistent Life: Principles for Bioethics in the Jain Tradition (UC Press, 2021). She is currently working on a monograph study of the Tattvārthasūtra and its commentaries.
“Defining Gender in Śvetāmbara Texts”
This presentation analyzes Jain canonical definitions of the term “man” (puruṣa) from a set of standpoints listed in the Sthānāṅga (Ṭhāṇaṃga). These include (1) name (nāman), representation (sthāpanā), and potentiality (dravya); (2) knowledge (jñāna), view (darśana), and conduct (caritra); (3) sexual orientation (veda), mark (cihna), and (verbal) expression (abhilāpa); and (4) superiority (uttamapuruṣa), mediocrity (madhyamapuruṣa), and inferiority (jaghanyapuruṣa), each with three further subcategories. The presentation explores the semantic range of the term indicated by these standpoints by examining similar passages in other Śvetāmbara texts and considers its significance within the broader context of the Jain discussions on gender.

Dr. Venu Mehta is an Assistant Professor of Jainism and Comparative Spiritualities at the Claremont School of Theology. Her research primarily focuses on Jainism, with a specialization in Jain regional-vernacular devotional literature, narratives, and practices. Her doctoral dissertation examines the devotion to the Jain goddess Padmāvatī among Śvetāmbar Mūrtipūjak Jains in Gujarat, highlighting the interplay between regional devotional expressions and broader Jain theological frameworks.
Beyond her work on Jain goddess traditions, Dr. Mehta’s scholarship extends to the Jain concept of forgiveness and the intersections of aparigraha (non-possessiveness) with human dignity, sustainability, and Gandhian economic thought. Her recent research and publications also engage in Jain-Hindu comparative theologies and spiritualities, particularly in relation to goddess traditions.
In addition to her expertise in Jain studies, Dr. Mehta teaches courses on South Asian religious traditions, comparative spiritualities, and gender and women in spiritual practices. Her methodological approach integrates ethnographic research with textual analysis, emphasizing the lived experiences, devotional expressions, and ritual practices of Jain communities.
“Reconceptualizing “Goddess” in Jainism: Devotional Practices for the Jain Goddess Padmāvatī among the Śvetāmbar Mūrtipūjak Jains in Gujarat”
This presentation explores how Śvetāmbar Mūrtipūjak Jains in Gujarat reconceptualize the goddess Padmāvatī through their devotional practices, positioning her as a central female form of divinity within Jain religious tradition. Though Jainism primarily emphasizes the worship of the Tīrthaṅkars, Padmāvatī, a śāsanadevatā (guardian deity) and yakṣī of Pārśvanāth, has been accorded exceptional devotion. By examining vernacular literature, narratives, and regional practices from the late sixteenth century to contemporary times, I argue that Jains in Gujarat have actively shaped a distinct space for goddess worship, elevating Padmāvatī from an attendant deity to Śakti, the Great Goddess, and the Mother Goddess. This process of reimagining Padmāvatī involves a synthesis of universal Jain values with regional devotional expressions, contributing to the dynamics of democratization, universalization, and regionalization in Jain religious life. Lay Jains play a crucial role in this transformation, engaging with Padmāvatī’s legacy through non-esoteric devotional practices and literature, thus reaffirming her place within their religious framework. Ultimately, this presentation highlights how Padmāvatī’s evolving identity reflects broader patterns of Jain devotionalism, redefining the boundaries of feminine divinity within the Jain tradition in Gujarat.

Shivani Bothra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Before this, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University in Houston, USA, and taught as a lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned her doctorate from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Her focus is South Asian traditions, Jainism, and Nonviolence. Shivani’s primary research areas are religious education and transnational Jainism, emphasizing Contemporary Jains.
“Spiritual Equality or Social Boundaries: Redefining Gender Roles in Diasporic Jainism”
This paper critically examines how gender roles in Jain diasporic communities are being redefined or reframed in ways distinct from traditional Indian contexts. How do education, modern professions, business ethics, and transnational networks influence the agency and status of Jain laywomen? In what ways do diasporic Jain women navigate their identities, negotiating between Indian religious traditions and evolving feminist discourses in their new sociocultural environments? Drawing on structured interviews with early Jain diaspora women, this research aims to shed light on the evolving spiritual and social roles of Jain women in a transnational context, assessing the extent to which diasporic Jainism fosters new models of gender participation and leadership.
This event is presented by the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion. It is co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women | Barbra Streisand Center.

Islamic China: An Asian History - Book Talk
2025-11-10 17:00 - 18:30 | UCLA Public Affairs Bldg., Rm 2270, 337 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
For more than a millennium, Islam has been a Chinese religion, and native-born Chinese Muslims have played important roles in their homeland—as butchers, merchants, and farmers; diplomats, scholar-officials, and royal astronomers. Yet the Muslims of China have often been understood as inherently foreign, incompatible with Chinese culture. In this reappraisal, Rian Thum recaptures the ordinariness of Chinese Muslims. In doing so, he suggests that these communities, whose classification has so often been seen as problematic, can teach us about the ways social categories are made and maintained in the first place.
Dr. Rian Thum is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The Nation, he is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, winner of the Fairbank Prize for East Asian History from the American Historical Association and the Hsu Prize for East Asian Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.
Sponsor(s): Program on Central Asia, APC, Asia Pacific Center, Center for the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies

CANCELLED: And God Laughed: Humor in the Bible
2026-01-15 16:00 | Royce Hall 306
Due to unforeseen circumstances, And God Laughed: Humor in the Bible with Joel Kaminsky has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will re-list if the event is rescheduled.
Since the Hebrew Bible is a sacred text for Jews and Christians many readers naturally assume it cannot contain any humor. This talk will explore several biblical narratives that employ humor to make serious theological points. Becoming aware of such biblical humor can enrich our understanding of these stories and of certain theological ideas the ancient biblical writers wished to emphasize.
Joel Kaminsky is the Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a professor of Bible in the Religion Department at Smith College where he has taught since 1997. His research explores the intersection between narrative and theological currents in the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic literature and seeks to illuminate the distinct ways that Jews and Christians over the past two millennia have interpreted the Hebrew Bible.
Joel Kaminsky (Smith College)
Moderator: Carol Bakhos (UCLA)
The Bible and the Ancient World Seminar Series
Sponsored by The UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion

A Tattered Leaf Covers the Torn: Class Dynamics of Buddhist Charity in Vietnam
2026-01-21 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 243
Professor Sara Ann Swenson (Dartmouth College) presents new research on how global trends in humanitarianism are enacted at the local level through the everyday ethics and informal practices of low-income and middle-class Buddhist volunteers in Vietnam.
Studies of humanitarianism tend to focus on the large-scale. They analyze disaster relief, international diplomacy, development politics, and privatized welfare. These studies highlight trends and policies that suggest generosity is becoming homogenized into “industrialized philanthropy.” Yet when global trends actualize in local communities, diverse ethics and interpretations of care reemerge. Differences flourish and conflicts arise over how to best care for others.
Sara Ann Swenson’s research examines the point at which national trends toward philanthropy are enacted on the ground by focusing on the role of low-income and middle-class Buddhist volunteers in Vietnam. Informal giving and “random acts of kindness” are difficult to quantify, meaning they are often overlooked among large-scale studies of humanitarianism. Yet these everyday ethics of care are also a major way that citizens—particularly low-income earners and middle-class workers—transform ethics of care into civic engagement and moral citizenship. Moreover, as volunteers draw on Buddhist teachings and practices to explain care in Vietnam, their religious ethics permeate secular and public institutions such as hospitals, universities, and social service programs. Close qualitative research shows how—even as processes of giving are increasingly globalized—the motivations, experiences, and relationships that arise from giving can vary greatly by context, depending on intersectional dynamics between donors and recipients. Researchers must always attend to questions of who is giving to whom and why for a comprehensive understanding of how social service needs are being met amid high-speed development and privatization in late socialist countries like Vietnam.
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Sara Ann Swenson is an Assistant Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College. She researches contemporary Buddhism in Vietnam. She holds a PhD and MPhil in Religion from Syracuse University, an MA in Comparative Religion from Iliff School of Theology, and a BA in English from the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her book Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Sponsor(s): Center for Buddhist Studies, Center for the Study of Religion, Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Satellite Ministries: The Rise of Christian Television in the Middle East
2026-01-27 14:30 - 16:30 | Bunche Hall 10383
In this book talk, Febe Armanios (Middlebury College) will present on her recently-published monograph Satellite Ministries, which explores how modern expressions of faith, technology, and political power intersected and clashed across the Global South and beyond through the analysis of sixteen Christian television channels in the Middle East. In 1981, a satellite television station called Star of Hope began broadcasting from Israeli-occupied South Lebanon. Later renamed Middle East Television (METV), its programming included American soap operas, sports, and evangelical content alongside innovative Arabic Christian televangelism. METV spurred the growth of competing Christian broadcasters and reshaped the Middle East’s media and religious landscape over the next four decades. Through extensive fieldwork and archival research, Febe Armanios explores how Western evangelicals and indigenous Christians harnessed terrestrial and satellite technologies to promote Christian television in the Middle East.
This is a hybrid event
In- person RSVP – click here.
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Co-sponsor: Center for Near Eastern Studies

Between Discordant Shores: Dante’s Francis, the Book of Islam and the Orient
2026-02-05 16:00 - 17:00 | Kaufman Hall Room 101
(Image: Coppo di Marcovaldo, St. Francis before the Sultan,” Sultan Malek al-Kāmil and his philosophers, Bardi Altarpiece, c. 1260s, Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence.)
Marking the 800th anniversary of St. Francis’s death in 2026, this talk draws on Morosini’s recent study Dante, Moses and the Book of Islam (2024) to explore Dante’s Francis and their shared conception of the Book of Islam and of the Orient. At its center is the Book’s role within the Commedia and in Dante’s representation of Francis, offering a new perspective on the Orient as a geographic space of dialogue rather than dehumanizing alterity.
This perspective, as emerged in Dante, Moses and the Book of Islam, calls for a reevaluation of Dante’s “discordant shores” of Paradiso IX, 85. In Dante’s vision, the Book becomes a bridge between cultures and faiths, a medium of transmission and encounter that links distant shores within a Mediterranean network of knowledge.
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Prior to joining UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies in July 2024, Professor Morosini was Professor of Italian at the Università L’Orientale di Napoli since 2022 and the 2024 Chair of Italian Culture at UC Berkeley.

A Multifaith Conversation on Justice, Forgiveness and Compassion
2026-02-24 18:00 - 20:00 | UCLA California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), 570 Westwood Plaza
In our deeply fractured world, religion serves both to connect and offer wisdom and to foster conflict and division. Over the course of centuries, it has been frequently invoked to justify brutal violence, but can it be an effective tool to advance justice? To explore different perspectives on the topic of faith, forgiveness, and justice, we will be joined by a distinguished panel of religious leaders: Father Greg Boyle, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Valarie Kaur, and Imam Dr. Jihad Turk.
Father Greg Boyle is a Jesuit priest and director of Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program. Rabbi Sharon Brous is the senior and founding Rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish spiritual community in Los Angeles. Valarie Kaur is a civil rights leader and activist, filmmaker, educator, best-selling author, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, a movement to reclaim love as a force for justice. Imam Dr. Jihad Turk is the founding President of Bayan Islamic Graduate School, a preeminent Muslim institution of higher education.
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Organized by and co-sponsored with the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute as part of their Compassionate Conversations series.

Who are the Tanguts and why do they matter? Writing, Religion, and Cultural Exchange in the Xia Kingdom
2026-03-05 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 243
The Tangut Xia kingdom flourished in the Ordos region and the Gansu Corridor between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. This talk will provide an introduction to the Tangut Xia kingdom, its unique writing system, and its dynamic religious traditions, highlighting the complex Chinese and Tibetan cultural interactions that shaped its historical development. By integrating elements of Chinese and Tibetan cultures, the Tanguts forged a unique religious and cultural amalgam.
The Tangut Xia kingdom flourished in the Ordos region and the Gansu Corridor between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Despite its relatively brief existence, it developed a distinctive literary culture and produced a rich textual heritage that deserves thorough and sustained academic study. During the early stages of state formation, Tangut emperors actively adopted and adapted elements of Chinese-style governance and bureaucratic institutions. At the same time, the Tangut rulers sponsored the acquisition, translation, and dissemination of the Chinese Buddhist canon. By integrating elements of Chinese and Tibetan cultures, the Tanguts forged a unique religious and cultural amalgam.
By the twelfth century, the introduction of Tibetan Buddhist texts further expanded the kingdom’s intellectual and religious horizons, bringing Tangut culture into close contact with Tibetan civilization. This talk will provide an introduction to the Tangut Xia kingdom, its unique writing system, and its dynamic religious traditions, highlighting the complex cultural interactions that shaped its historical development.
Speaker: Nikita Kuzmin is a historian of the Middle Period China. He joined Elling Eide Center in August 2025 as a visiting scholar after graduating from a Ph.D. program from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in 2023. Prior to coming to UPenn, Nikita have lived and studied in Russia, China, Germany, Nepal, and Japan. He has a strong research interest in the history of the Tangut period (11th-13th centuries) of the greater Dunhuang area, as well as circulation of people, books, and thoughts along the Silk Roads.
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This event is organized by and co-sponsored with the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies.

EVENT POSTPONED: The Complex Interplay of Religion, Law and Politics in Israel
2026-03-09 17:30 - 18:30 | Bunche Hall 10383
We regret to inform you that this March 9th on-campus event featuring Orly Erez-Likhovski as been postponed, as the speaker is unable to fly to us from Israel due to the war with Iran. We will notify you when/if we can host this event in the future.
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Without the protections of a written constitution and a clear separation of religion and state, Israelis face unique challenges in securing fundamental rights to equality and religious freedom under Israeli law. Although Israel’s Declaration of Independence commits to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex” the authority of the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate and the disproportionate influence of Orthodox political parties within Israel’s parliamentary system have contributed to violations of the rights of women, non-Orthodox Jews, members of the LGBTQ+ community and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Israeli lawyer and activist Orly Erez-Likhovski will discuss key legal battles in Israel to protect and advance Israeli democracy and religious pluralism.
Speaker: Orly Erez-Likhovski, Director of Israel Religious Action Center
Moderator: Carol Bakhos, Robert E. Archer Chair in the Study of Religion, Director, UCLA Center for the Study of Religion
CLICK HERE for more information and to register for this in-person event. After registering, you will be emailed an RSVP confirmation. If you do not receive your email confirmation, please check your spam or junk mail folders.
About the Speakers
Orly Erez-Likhovski has served as an attorney at the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) since 2004, as Director of the Legal Department from 2014–2021, and Director of IRAC since 2021. In these roles, she has brought about significant legal achievements such as making gender segregation on public transportation illegal, ending the Orthodox monopoly on state-funded salaries to rabbis, filing (and winning) the first-ever class action suit regarding exclusion of women, and disqualifying racist candidates from running to Israel’s parliament. Orly holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Tel Aviv University and a master’s degree in law with a focus on human rights law from Columbia University in New York. She is a member of the Bar Association in Israel and New York.
Carol Bakhos (moderator) is Professor of Late Antique Judaism and Jewish Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and teaches for the Study of Religion IDP. Since 2012 she has served as Chair of the Study of Religion program and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA. Her most recent monograph, The Family of Abraham: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Interpretations (Harvard University Press, 2014), was translated into Turkish (2015). In 2018, Bakhos received an NEH Summer-Institute grant to direct “Religious Landscapes of LA: Teaching and Exploring Religious Diversity Through Civic Engagement,” for K-12 educators.

Organized by the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. This event is part of the Center’s series “Religion in Israeli Society.” Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion.

The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution
2026-04-09 15:30 - 16:30 | Bunche Hall 10383
Muslim charities and community organizations have assumed a significant role in refugee support since the Syrian catastrophe: in Jordan and Canada, as elsewhere, they deliver food aid, house orphans, and organize remedial education. But Islam is more than just a resource for humanitarian projects. The Dread Heights details how the Islamic tradition guides refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars in a world of brutal sieges and mass displacement. Even as refugees become objects of humanitarian concern suspended between national orders, this ethnography brings another suspension into view: a form of life whose gestures are illuminated by the Quranic figure of the Heights. In the shadow of war, beyond humanitarian order, Islam offers an orientation to the devastation of the present.
Basit Kareem Iqbal is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Member in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University. An anthropologist and longtime academic editor, his research explores the difficulty of the present within and across distinct traditions and forms of life. He is author of The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (2025) and editor of collaborative journal issues on tribulation (2022), the destruction of loss (2023), the incapacitations of tradition (2026), and the unmooring of the present (2027). His current projects include translating a book on the representation of violence and writing a series of essays on evil in creation.
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Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, Center for Middle East Development, Center for Study of International Migration, Islamic Studies, and the Center for the Study of Religion

Music and Religion in Popular Culture: The Case of Orthodox Jews and Christian Contemporary Music
2026-05-13 12:00 - 13:15 | Kaplan 365
Since the 1960s religious practitioners have created their own music to express their beliefs and values to shield the community from popular culture. The Irony is they use the popular culture that they reject from American culture in their music. This presentation by Mark Kligman (UCLA) will highlight important composers and groups with audio and video examples of Orthodox Jewish and Christian Contemporary Music.
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Co-sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience.

Gods and the Abyss: Encountering Oceanic Agency at the Edge of the Ancient World
2026-05-29 14:00 - 15:30 | Kaplan 365
This presentation examines how coastal communities in antiquity conceived of the sea not merely as a physical environment, but as a powerful, living force endowed with agency. Such perceptions became especially vivid in the aftermath of coastal catastrophes. The Gulf of Cádiz, on the southwestern edge of the Iberian Peninsula, serves as the primary case study. Its broad floodplains and pronounced tidal regimes made it highly vulnerable to extreme events, including storm surges and tsunamis, which repeatedly reshaped both the landscape and human experience. By tracing how societies from antiquity to the present have responded to episodes of catastrophic marine flooding through religious practice and ritualized forms of engagement, the paper explores the complex interplay between human action and the more-than-human agency of the sea.
Manuel Álvarez-Martí-Aguilar is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Málaga (Spain) and currently a Getty Villa Scholar. His research interests include modern historiography of the ancient world and the cultural intersections between local Iberian communities—especially Tartessos—and the Phoenicians. His recent work focuses on the impact of earthquakes and tsunamis on coastal communities of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as their resilient responses to these kinds of environmental shocks with often catastrophic consequences. He has co-edited, with Francisco Machuca Prieto, the volume Historical Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Archaeology in the Iberian Peninsula (Springer, 2022) and co-organised the workshop Fluid Horizons: Charting Ancient Environmental History and Blue Humanities (University of London, 2024).
Co-sponsored with the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures and the Kershaw Chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies

(De)medicalization and the Dying Body: Sallekhanā, Kinship, and the Limits of Liberal Bioethics
2026-05-31 14:00 - 16:00 | Royce Hall 306
In this talk, Miki Chase (U of Wisconsin-Madison) explores how trajectories of illness and care, such as terminal cancer or anticipated cognitive decline, are reinterpreted through Jain doctrinal frameworks in the narratives of adult children of women who undertake the Jain ritual fast to death (sallekhanā or santhāra). Drawing on ethnographic accounts of women’s deaths in contemporary urban Jain households, Chase traces how narratives of bodily decline are reframed not as losses to be managed through medical intervention but as conditions of spiritual possibility that invite ascetic detachment and renunciation. Rather than resisting biomedical or bioethical paradigms outright, these narratives inhabit a complex zone of overlap where cognitive clarity is both a medical and religious ideal; the attenuation of pain is karmically elevated rather than clinically managed; and the logic of institutionalized care is subtly displaced not by the absence of obligation but by alternate forms of care. In tracing the limits of bioethical paradigms that presume the necessity of medicalization and institutional oversight, this talk describes how “illness narratives” and “santhāra narratives” coalesce to challenge prevailing understandings of what it means to die well, and how suffering, pain, and the medicalized body is accounted for in the lives—and deaths—of Jain women.
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(Parking information for Royce Hall)
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Miki Chase is Assistant Professor in South Asian Studies and holds the Śrī Anantnāth Endowed Chair in Jain Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on intersections of religion, law, and gender in questions of care around death and dying in India, with a specific focus on Jainism.
Dr. Chase received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, and her doctoral work received the Mohini Jain Presidential Chair in Jain Studies Best Dissertation Prize (2024). Her research focuses on the contemporary practice of the legally contested Jain voluntary ritual fast until death known variably as sallekhanā, santhāra, or samādhi-maraṇa, examining how lay Jains reconcile ideals and concepts outlined in scripture with the interreligious pressures of urban life and modernization of death, foregrounding the centrality of women’s moral subjectivities in such negotiations. Her research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the American Institute for Indian Studies (AIIS), including the Rachel F. and Scott McDermott Junior Research Fellowship. Her book in progress is tentatively titled The Ambiguity of the Vow: Law, Kinship, and Gender in Pathologizing the Jain Fast Until Death.

Study of Religion Welcome Reception
2026-10-15 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce Hall 306
Lift a glass to the new academic year and meet friends old and new!
Welcome remarks by Dean Stern and Professor Bakhos at 4:30p.
RSVP required by October 11. See you there!

The Paradox of Pointless Suffering
2026-10-26 16:00 - 17:15 | Royce Hall 306
Why do we suffer? Why do people die young? Is there any point to our excessive pain, physical or emotional? This talk explores the ways that we have tried to minimize or eliminate suffering, and examines people’s attempts to find ways to live with pointless suffering. Ultimately, to be fully human—and to have healthy culture—means to acknowledge a mysterious paradox: we must simultaneously accept suffering and oppose it.
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Scott Samuelson studied philosophy at Grinnell College (BA, 1995, valedictorian) and Emory University (PhD, 2001). He is currently a Professor of Practice in the Departments of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University. In 2014, he was named Distinguished Humanities Educator by the Community College Humanities Association. Inspired by his students, he wrote his first book The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which has been well received not just by prominent reviewers but by numerous non-philosophers who found their philosophical voice with its help. The book has been translated into Chinese and Portuguese. Samuelson has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Philosopher’s Magazine, and Christian Century. His article “Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers” in The Atlantic has been widely circulated. He’s been interviewed on NPR and given various public lectures and talks, including a TEDx talk “How Philosophy Can Save Your Life.”
Scott Samuelson was the recipient of the 2015 Hiett Prize in the Humanities.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies.
