Department of English

This seminar examines the entangled histories of religion, race, sexuality through literature. Rather than treating devotion and desire, faith and embodiment, or theology and politics as separate domains, we will examine how their intersections have historically produced categories of identity, difference, and community. How are spiritual and secular discourses of desire mutually constitutive? Is the experience of religious devotion— with its gender-fluid identifications, erotic raptures, and bodily disciplines —ever anything but queer? To what extent do monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) depend on, and even construct, racialized hierarchies? By situating these questions within early modern theology as well as modern and contemporary contexts, the seminar challenges the presumed stability of selfhood, morality, and monogamy that are often taken as normative in definitions of faith. Our approach will interrogate how theological discourse not only regulated but also destabilized emergent formations of race, sexuality, and gender. Bringing together literary texts, theological writings, ethnographies, and critical theory, the course advances a comparative and transhistorical framework. In doing so, the seminar positions religion as a generative archive for rethinking how categories of race and sexuality take shape. It also underscores the methodological stakes of reading devotion and desire together: attending to their entanglement unsettles the boundaries of periodization, resituates canonical works in broader transnational contexts, and opens the study of literature to comparative religious and queer frameworks.