Religious Studies is a field that allows you to bring many forms of inquiry to bear on the study of religion. In our close-knit department you’ll find graduate students and faculty dedicated to their roles as researchers, teachers, and mentors.
The following are some of the organizations and resources at Indiana University that are of particular interest to our graduate students.
Bloomington is a fun and exciting place to live, offering cultural events, festivals, music, and lots of dining options. Find out what makes our town so special.
All of our graduate students are members of the Graduate Religious Studies Association (GRSA). This group provides information and advice to the faculty regarding graduate student issues. GRSA sponsors department activities and extracurricular activities that may be especially helpful to students new to the department. It also designs and executes the department’s annual graduate student conference, hosts social and pre-professional events, and partners with the Undergraduate Religious Studies Association (URSA) to foster connections among all students.
GRSA has just announced this year’s theme for their annual conference, “The Fetish, and Other Ghosts.” Religious Studies is a field haunted — haunted by whiteness and its vicissitudes, ghosts and bedfellows we imagined dead. But such ghosts do not so easily die: they haunt, they linger, and they inflect the study of religion in their yet-aliveness. This conference aims to consider more deeply the study of religion and its historical intimacy with and dependence on whiteness and its global-colonial epistemologies.
GRSA invites graduate students to participate in their annual spring conference. This year’s conference will be held in a hybrid format (in-person and online) on April 8-9th, 2022. The conference schedule is as follows:
Founded in Bloomington in 1820, Indiana University is one of the leading Research-1 universities in the nation. The College of Arts and Sciences is home to more than 50 research centers and institutes that offer a remarkable breadth of resources for research and creative activity.
Approximately one-third of the nearly 40,000 students enrolled at the Bloomington campus are graduate and professional school students. The University Graduate School, of which the Department of Religious Studies is a constituent unit, offers outstanding academic programs alongside professional schools of national reputation, including the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, the Kelley School of Business, the Jacobs School of Music, the Maurer School of Law, and the three schools of the College: the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design, the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and The Media School.
As a result of efforts dating back to World War II, Indiana University is a major center of international studies. This work is concentrated in a large number of federally and foundation-funded area study centers and in widely-respected language and literature programs.
The Bloomington campus offers a variety of academic and cultural opportunities for minority students, such as the Black Culture Center, the Office of Latino Affairs, and La Casa. The Office of Women’s Affairs is concerned with the status of all women on campus. This office sponsors speakers and career workshops for graduate women.
The College of Arts