Friday, April 5 at 4:00, LC 319. The Americanist & Theory & Media Studies Colloquium present: Spiritual Technologies
Kathryn Lofton is the Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at Yale. As a scholar of religion and American culture, her research investigates the inseparability of religion and its cultural constructions and, likewise, the extent to which culture itself is embedded in religious histories. Her first book, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011) used the example of Oprah Winfrey to explore the formation of religion in modern America. She is currently working on several projects, including a study of sexuality and religion; an analysis of parenting practices in twentieth-century America; and a religious history of Bob Dylan.
John Lardas Modern earned his bachelor’s in religion from Princeton University in 1993, his master’s in comparative religion from Miami University of Ohio (1996) and his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2003. Modern teaches classes in American religious history, literature, technology, and aesthetics. Modern has written across many venues and is the author of Secularism in Antebellum America (University of Chicago Press) and The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (University of Illinois Press, 2001). Modern is currently working on a long-term project, The Religion Machine as well as an essay entitled, “My E-meter and Me.”
John Williams is Assistant Professor of English at Yale. His research and teaching focus on the intersections between international histories of technological innovation and the perceived difference of racial and cultural otherness. My current book project, “Technology and the Meeting of East and West,” examines the role of technological discourse in representations of Asian/American aesthetics in late-nineteenth and twentieth century film and literature. I argue that insofar as Anglo American modernism based its aesthetic innovations on a range of new technologies, it did so by throwing into question the relation of these technologies to the cultural traditions from which it seemed to break. It is from this vantage that Asia signaled both the perilous transnationalization of Western technologies as well as an especially therapeutic and non-alienated relation between technê and the environment.