The Department of Religion offers the graduate concentration in Critique, Image and Politics to explore how religions shape and are shaped in aesthetics, ethics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and political and culture theory.

The Critique, Image and Politics curriculum consists of four thematic clusters of courses. Students may repeat a given course up to three times so long as it is offered with a different subtitle reflecting different material.

Corporealities in the Study of Religion

• Classical and recent theorizations of embodiment, body, flesh, and materiality, including philosophical ontologies as well as theories of gender and sexuality. 

Images in the Study of Religion

• Theoretical approaches in the study of religion to objects and events as reflected in the image, and to the image in art, film, and technology. 

Thought in the Study of Religion

• Key figures and texts in continental philosophy of religion, including hermeneutical, phenomenological, and post-phenomenological approaches.

Subjectivities in the Study of Religion

• Methodological approaches to the formation of critical subjects under the rubrics of ethics, psychoanalytic theory, theories of consciousness and the sociology of religion.

Core Faculty for the Critique, Image & Politics concentration