
Buddhism and Popular Culture
To explore how religion intersects with popular culture, this discussion-intensive seminar takes a global, international perspective on Buddhism.
We offer graduate courses that focus on a wide variety of topics and themes that emphasize the interdisciplinary study of religion. Graduate students in our program have recently explored such diverse topics as the sacred and the profane, extinction, materiality, and superheroes. In our courses, students often work with historical, textual, and ethnographic approaches while exploring how different theoretical and analytical lenses can illuminate particular topics in religious studies.
Interested in seeing our courses?
To explore how religion intersects with popular culture, this discussion-intensive seminar takes a global, international perspective on Buddhism.
This course will examine several traditions of Indigenous thought, with a focus on the peoples indigenous to the Americas and the Pacific.
In this course we will try to think through how different religious ethics order the world and motivate people to engage in social and political struggles, up to and including violent conflict.
In this course, we will look at the development of ideologies and mythologies surrounding the development, practice, and meaning of the martial arts in Chinese and Japanese thought, from the early medical practices of the Han dynasty to the development of modern martial arts, as well as the role of the East Asian martial arts in contemporary global culture.