Bonus! LIVE: "Public Humanities, Public Jokes" with Dr. J. Barton Scott @ the University of Toronto
Transcript this LIVE episode:
(unedited) PDF! & digital link via Buzzsprout!
Shownotes for this LIVE Episode:
It’s our VERY first LIVE episode!
On March 11, 2021, we “visited”—by which we mean we sat in Maine and Vermont and Toronto all logged into teams at the same time—the University of Toronto. The Department for the Study of Religion, and specifically the Religion in the Public Sphere program, welcomed us into conversation with the one and only Dr. J Barton Scott. Prof. Scott is a rockstar of a thinker—see below for some of his work—and we remain so honored that he reached out, set up this wonderful event, and allowed us to record it.
A quick note on the University of Toronto. As some of you may know, in late April 2021—well after our virtual visit—the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) issued its first censure since 2008 over the cancelation of international law expert Dr. Valentina Azarova’s hire. Her previous scholarship and commentary on Palestine and Israel were cited as political motivation to cancel her position. We stand with the current boycott, support the censure, and urge you to read more about it all, here, here, here, and here.
It is vital that we mention that our colleagues at the University of Toronto, across departments and disciplines have issued supportive statements. A whole (and ever-growing) list can be found here. We want to explicitly mention that the Department for the Study of Religion (DSR) has also stood in solidarity with Dr. Azarova and the CAUT censure. Please find the DSR department statement here.
Anyway, here it is, folks, it’s our first “live taping” of our pod! As we do more of these talks and presentations, we’ll try to do more of these special episodes. We want to thank all the folks at the University of Toronto who made this happen, including Dr. Scott, Nicole Bergot, and the graduate and undergraduate student fellows in the Religion and the Public Sphere program. Y’all did a great job and we learned so much from you all.
A quick note: per our agreement with all parties involved, we did not include the Q&A in our live episode. This is both to protect student anonymity and, frankly, because consent practices matter to us!
For the full, live event (video), click here!
Your homework for this LIVE Bonus Episode:
Check out Dr. J. Barton Scott’s work! This selection reflects Ilyse’s most favorite of his corpus of work. Judge her, not Dr. Scott.
Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia, co-edited with Dr. Brannon Ingram and Dr. SherAli Tareen (2016)
"Aryas Unbound: Print Hinduism and the Cultural Regulation of Religious Offense,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 35, no. 2 (2015): 294-309.
“Unsaintly Virtue: Swami Dayananda Saraswati and Modern Hindu Hagiography,” Journal of Hindu Studies 7, no. 3 (2014): 371-391.
“Comic Book Karma: Visual Mythologies of the Hindu Modern,” in Inscriptions, eds. Jeremy Stolow and Lisa Gitelman, special issue of Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds 4, no. 2 (2010): 177-197.