About
The Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life supports academic research, teaching, and scholarship on the study of religion, culture, and social difference at Columbia University. In addition, it convenes academic conferences, public forums, and collaborative programming to support and extend academic and scholarly understanding of these topics, and to disseminate and distribute such new understandings to broader publics and communities.
The Institute actively supports scholarship, teaching and public programming across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as well as in the University more broadly under the auspices and oversight of the Department of Religion.
What’s New
Events
RELIGION, Culture AND PUBLIC LIFE
Our core event series, Religion, Culture, and Public Life, provides a platform for exploration and debate of both pressing current events and the often overlooked ways in which religion can figure in the different aspects of society, the economy, and the arts. In recent years, we have discussed the rise of populism and conspiracy theories, White Christian gun culture in the United States, the sexual politics of Black Churches, and the atrocities against the Uyghur in Xinjiang.
The Monster Series
Few things are better at teaching us about our own world than monsters. Lurking at the edges, deforming desecrations of the human, they also paradoxically enable insight for transformation. This new series investigates the power, appeal, and fear of monsters across a wide array of contexts, cultures, and registers — from monsters in America, to the monstrosity of AI. Join us as we contemplate the monstrously invisible that is all around us. This series is co-organized with the Center for Religion and Media at New York University.
Religion and Climate
IRCPL’s Religion and Climate series is animated by calls to reimagine human relationships with and responsibilities to the environment in an age of planetary crisis. As the impact of climate change is increasingly but unevenly felt, religion is emerging as a site of epistemological doubt, struggle, and possibility. This series will explore the cosmological underpinnings that shape diverse understandings of the environment and examine how religious subjects react to and act upon the ecological upheavals they face, challenging exclusively technocratic or secular responses to the climate crisis.
Opportunities
Joint projects
IRCPL will fund projects by Columbia University faculty that aim to understand the role of religion in the contemporary world and its historical roots. Joint Project funding may be applied to research projects, seminars, conferences, working groups, and other programs that bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars.
student fellowships
Every year, IRCPL awards a number of research fellowships to students traveling over the summer to complete their dissertation or other research projects:
Undergraduate Summer Fellowships
THE CLAREMONT PRIZE
The Claremont Prize in the Study of Religion is dedicated to the publication of first books by early career scholars working in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences. Prize-winners will be invited to IRCPL to participate in a workshop and the books will appear in IRCPL’s series, “Religion, Culture, and Public Life,” published by Columbia University Press.