This interdisciplinary graduate seminar examines the role of material and sensory cultures in lived religious experience in comparative perspective. The goal of the course is to study the complex relationships, hierarchies, and roles of images, objects, the built environment, and ritual performance, and the cultural construction of the human sensorium (including consideration of whether a religious sensorium exists) in its external and internal forms.

Using case studies, the tools to analyze and describe materiality and/or sensory experiences in religious practices will be developed through the study of topics such as sacred objects, space and place, ethnography of the object (how to write about things), the idea of a religious sensorium, perception, digital religion, and the non-human.