Over the past 25 years, the interdisciplinary field of critical secular studies has transformed how scholars think about the place of religion in the modern world. At mid-20th century, the prevailing paradigm was the so-called "secularization thesis" — the notion that modernity necessarily produces a diminution of religion or its retreat from the public sphere.

This paradigm was challenged by the rise of religious nationalisms after 1979 in Iran, the U.S., India, and elsewhere. In the mid-2000s, against the backdrop of the U.S. "war on terror," a newly emergent paradigm began to coalesce at the intersection of religious studies, anthropology, political theory, history, and other fields, producing a kind of Copernican turn in the study of religion and secularism.

This seminar provides graduate students with an intensive introduction to this critical turn, toward a more sophisticated framing of their own research projects on religion, culture, and politics. What, we will ask, were the historical conditions for the emergence of secularity as modern social imaginary and secularism as technology of governance? How was secularism entangled with modern concepts of "religion" and the "public"?