Being Human Institute

The mission of the Being Human Institute (BHI) is to reimagine the public significance of scholarship on religion by creating and sustaining a cohort of early-career scholars who read and write religion beyond existing genres and disciplines.

We sought (and found) a multidisciplinary group of applicants who shared a commitment to working collaboratively, thinking experimentally, and communicating with and from diverse publics. The BHI cohort of nine includes four anthropologists, two Americanists, a medievalist, a political scientist, and literary scholar with a degree in African and African American Diaspora Studies. They hail from Canada and Germany and Pakistan and Turkey and the Caribbean, and are working on Black poetics, Syrian refugees, interreligious sociality, disability in Uganda, Koranic translatability, trans theory, state surveillance, and Catholic theologies of cognitive impairment. The mix of fields was important, for it necessitated work of translation even as we all found ways to engage one another’s work. The overall spirit of the group was one of intellectual generosity and a willingness to work hard—qualities we attribute not only to the choice of participants but also by our decision to devote the first year to community formation and low-stakes, collaborative discussions of dream projects rather than requiring feedback on work in process. All noted their hunger for the sort of conversations and companionship this gathering enabled, outside of the structures of their own institutions.

Cohort of Early-Career Scholars

Seçil Daǧtaș
Gina Giliberti
Basit Kareem Iqbal
C. Libby
Tyrone S. Palmer
Matthew Smith
Yunus D. Telliel
Andrew Walker-Cornetta
Tyler Zoanni

Organizers and visiting faculty:

Constance Furey (lead faculty)
Amira Mittermeier (2021)
Winni Sullivan (2022)
David Maldonado Rivera (2022, 2023, 2024)
Noah Salomon (2023, 2024)

BHI Reading Group

   

The Being Human Institute’s work on an edited volume continued over the summer, via Zoom, in a reading group prompted by persistent questions about the categories of singularity and universality as well as theology. We began with an essay on theopolitics, “Incarnate Politics Beyond the Cross and the Sword,” by Carlota McAllister and Valentina Napolitano; explored the dense theoretica account of singularity in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural and then concluded with two novels, Ia Genberg’s The Details, translated by Kira Josefsson, and John Banville’s Singularities. A line from Genberg’s translator served as a touchstone for the discussion: “There is no one whole,” she writes, rather, citing Genberg,  ‘the whole is loose at the edges’ . All we have then, are those fraying threads, flapping in the wind, and the complex ways they tie fast to each other.”  So too with our collaborative writing project: there is no one whole, and many threads, but we are learning much by thinking and talking together about the ways they—and we—are intertwined.