The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution
2026-04-09 15:30 - 16:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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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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.
