AHA Interviewing Advice and Some More Sessions of Note

Paul Harvey

Randall posted a few days ago about some sessions of note in religious history at the upcoming American Historical Association/American Society of Church History meeting, Jan. 6-9 in Boston. I thought I would note in addition, first, that for you graduate students who follow the blog here, Tenured Radical and John Fea both have posted excellent suggestions for job interviewing at the AHA, no one's favorite thing to do for sure but the suggestions here are valuable (I think I made every single mistake that Tenured Radical warns you against back in my day; wish someone had told me this then).

Also, a couple of our commentators here added a couple more sessions of interest in addition to those which Randall posted, and I thought I would repost those here for those who didn't see the comments on that post so wouldn't have seen those sessions noted.

1. The Black Women's Intellectual History Project is sponsoring a session on Friday morning (Jan. 7) from 9:30-11:30 on transnational perspectives on black women's religious leadership. Jon Sensbach, Natasha Lightfoot, and Eve Troutt Powell will be giving papers.

2. Cosmopolitanism and Religion in the Turn of the Twentieth Century U.S. Left
AHA Session 102
Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3
Friday, January 7, 2011: 2:30 PM-4:30 PM
Orleans Room (Marriott Boston Copley Place)

Chair:
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University

Papers:
“Has He Paused and Taken Thought?” Mark Twain's "War Prayer," Pacifism, and the Impact of Empathy
John Pettegrew, Lehigh University
Spiritual Unity, Social Progress: The National Federation of Religious Liberals and the Legacy of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions
Amy Marie Kittelstrom, Sonoma State University
Holidays for Humanity's Future: Festivals at New York's Ethical Culture School, 1890–1920
Emily Mace, Princeton University

Comment:
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Harvard University

Comments

Jeremy Young said…
Another session of note, for those interested in religious history in a broad way, is Session 53 on Friday morning, "The Question of Rationality in History" (full disclosure: I organized the panel and am giving a paper on it). None of the three papers directly references religion in their titles, but each addresses the study of religion in both its evidence and its interpretation. My paper draws on testimonials from followers of the evangelist Billy Sunday, among others, to suggest a new direction for historians of the American Progressive Era to follow. Scott Girdner’s paper focuses on uses of rationality in the career of the medieval Islamic religious leader Al-Ghazali, and Elizabeth Nelson’s fascinating work, part of which I’ve heard before, connects a variety of French phenomena ranging from the development of psychoanalysis, to religious insanity, to the development of “esotericism” in the sciences. The full panel listing is here.

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