Dear Students, Faculty and Staff of the Department of History,
We are continuing our departmental tradition of organizing weekly research seminars. In these seminars, professors and researchers provide insights into their current work.
On Tuesday, 01.03.2022, 17:40 PM CET, we will have a lecture by Julian Strube, Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Vienna.
Title: Hinduism in Colonial Bengal and the Relevance of Global Historical Approaches for Religious Studies
Zoom link will be displayed on the day of the seminar here:
https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/93337103536?pwd=bzJ5M3E1eXpRUkZSQldRUnFRQVZYdz09
Meeting ID: 933 3710 3536
Passcode: 271164
Abstract:
Was Hinduism invented by colonial administrators and orientalists, or was it a modern name for an age-old tradition at the core of Indian culture? For decades, debates have moved between those two positions and are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. I am proposing the approach of global religious history (globale Religionsgeschichte) as a possible way out of current deadlocks that also relate to the issue of religious comparativism and the applicability of “religion” beyond “the West.” A combination of perspectives and tools from religious studies, global history, and South Asian studies, this approach will be illustrated by relating local developments in Bengal to various global connections that conditioned and structured them. Firstly, I will explore the nineteenth-century struggle between self-referentially reformist or modern and revivalist or orthodox movements, arguing for the futility of clear distinctions between them and the consequent necessity to investigate local diachronic developments in their own right. Second, I will show the relevance of that context for the emergence of religious studies, by shining a spotlight on a veritable tangle of orientalist scholarship, local traditions, and actors such as the members and interlocutors of the Theosophical Society.
Bio: Julian Strube is assistant professor in religious studies at the University of Vienna. He works from a global historical perspective about the relationship between religion and politics, as well as debates about the meaning of religion, science, and philosophy since the eighteenth century. He examines these and related subjects from the perspective of a global religious history, with a focus on colonial Bengal. He recently co-edited Theosophy Across Boundaries with Hans-Martin Krämer (2020), followed by New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism (2021), co-edited with Egil Asprem. In 2021, he also co-edited a special issue on “Global Religious History” with Giovanni Maltese for Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. His third monograph, Global Tantra: Religion, Science, and Nationalism in Colonial Modernity, is set for a February 2022 release with Oxford University Press.
We welcome all members of the department!
Daniela Munteanu and Jan Hennings