Exploring Other Worlds: Constructing, Locating, and Navigating Imagined Religious Space

Annual Graduate Student Conference. Sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies and co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Free and open to the public.
How is spatial discourse used as a map for navigating imagined domains such as memory, other worlds, lost homelands, and unexplored regions? How are imagined religious geographies such as cosmology and the afterlife made real through narrative and material representations?
Scholars of religion have long examined material space under the rubric of “sacred space,” yet the role of imagined space and spatial discourse in religious imagery, writing, and performance has been largely overlooked. Recognizing that imagined space may be equally or more real for religious actors than the physical world, the 2015 graduate student conference in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University contributes to new approaches to the “spatial turn” in Religious Studies with keynote and panel presentations concerning imagined space in religious history and culture.
Keynote addresses by D. Max Moerman (Columbia University) and Robert T. Tally, Jr. (Texas State University).
Panel presentations under the themes of “Geographies of Alterity,” “Reconstructing Cosmologies,” and “Textual Worlds.”