On March 16th, NAASR members gathered virtually to talk about their new research and the scholarship from outside of Religious Studies that was inspiring them. Dr. Lauren Horn Griffin (Louisiana State University) and Dr. Vaia Touna (University of Alabama) shared about their current research projects and the conversation that followed produced a list of exciting resources! We have collected those here and have included a little blurb from the person who suggested the resource:

• Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet by Ted Striphas (Columbia University Press, 2023).
  • The book asks how we construct ideas of “culture” and how those ideas both change with new media but also influence our perception of new media. An exciting question that comes out of this is how the Arnoldian idea that culture consists of the best thought of a time might relate to how we imagine the ranking and selection functions of social-media algorithms. (Suggestion by Lauren Horn Griffin)
• Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media by Matthew Flisfader (Northwestern University Press, 2021).
  • This book tracks the ways in which new media follows the logic  of neoliberal desire and shapes our desire in line with the reigning forms of ideology. (Suggestion by Matt Sheedy)
• Ancient Greece on British Television edited by Fiona Hobden and Amanda Wrigley (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
  • An edited volume that explores the way Ancient Greek myths adopted and adapted to meet present interests in a variety of tv genre, from documentaries to animation, that were produced and broadcasted on British Tv since the ’50s showcasing how “Ancient Greece” is always “in the making.” (Suggestion by Vaia Touna)
• Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect by Yannis Hamilakis (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
  • Hamilakis is arguing for a different approach to the archaeological practice one that considers bodily senses, aiming to reconstitute archaeology as a sensorial and affective multi-temporal practice. (Suggestion by Vaia Touna)
• Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian by Jonathan M. Hall (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
  • Through a series of cases studies Hall is looking at how historians construct a past that is not supported when one is looking at the archaeological evidence, urging for a collaboration between history and classical archaeology as a way to make up for the discrepancy. (Suggestion by Vaia Touna)
• Deconstructing History by Alun Munslow (Routledge, 2006 [1997]).
  • In this book Alun Munslow looks at the historical practice as has developed after the postmodern era. He not only provides an overview of the debates and issues of postmodernist history but also offers his own challenging theories as a way forward. (Suggestion by Vaia Touna)
• Digital Mythology And The Internet’s Monster: The Slender Man by Vivian Asimos (Bloomsbury, 2021).
  • In this book Vivian Asimos is looking at Slender Man, a story of a monster that emerged in the digital world, Asimos is interested in answering two questions “what cultural group can claim the Slender Man?” and “What is the myth actually saying?” To answer these questions Asimos proposes a structuralist approach arguing that the method offers more possibilities in understanding the digital culture. (Suggestion by Vaia Touna)
• Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past by Ethan Kleinberg (Stanford University Press, 2017).
  • This book has interesting things to say about, among other things, how scholarly historicizing efforts fetishize lived experience, materialism, and the “real.” Kleinberg offers a Derridean approach to the past, positioning it as both present and absent and applying it to contemporary digital forms of historical writing. (Suggestion by K. Merinda Simmons)
• Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh (Verso Books, 2024).
  • This book argues that ‘immediacy’ is the new master-category for understanding 21st century cultural production, where things like same-day shipping, on-demand viewing, and algorithmic curation limit our capacity to mediate the world through systems and theories in favour of a post-critical NOW. (Suggestion by Matt Sheedy)
• “Recycling History: An Essay” by Carla Nappi (and other books)
  • Nappi is a “historical pataphysician” who plays with scholarly methods in really exciting and novel ways. Her discussions are useful to anyone interested in questions of method and theory. (Suggestion by K. Merinda Simmons)
• Secrets, Lies, and Consenquences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and His Protégés Unsolved Murder by Bruce Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2023).
  • A page-turner and a must-read book especially for religious studies scholars. Bruce Lincoln is looking at the events that led to the unsolved murder of Ioan Culianu, associate professor at the University of Chicago and Mircea Eliade’s protégé, starting from Mircea Eliade’s involvement with the Romanian fascist movement. The book certainly is an invitation to self-reflexivity of the field’s complex past. (Suggestion by Vaia Touna)
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff (Hachette Book Group, 2019).
  • This book draws heavily on thinkers like  W.H. Auden and Emile Durkheim and takes aim the ways in which corporations  like Google have increasingly monetized human digital relations, leading to  what she calls a ‘third modernity,’ where the means of production happens  out of sight, over and above our heads. (Suggestion by Matt Sheedy)
• The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media by José van Dijck (Oxford University Press, 2013).
  • This book looks at how then-emerging forms of networked communication has lead to platformed modes of sociality, tracing early developments that have shaped our echo-cultural worlds. (Suggestion by Matt Sheedy)
• This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips (MIT Press, 2016).
  • The book talks about trolling as a feature rather than a bug of the contemporary media landscape. Focusing on cultural context rather than the exceptionalism of a specific phenomenon, it’s got some interesting resonance for religion scholars who want to think about how phenomena (whether media-related or not) are manufactured. (Suggestion by K. Merinda Simmons)
• Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities by Rogers Brubaker (Princeton University Press, 2016).
  • In this book Roger Brubaker is interested in exploring “the contemporary transformations of, and struggles over, gender and race as systems of social classification” by looking at the cases of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal and the kind of discussions they have sparked both within but also outside scholarly circles. (Suggestion by Vaia Touna)
• “Twenty Theses on Posthumanism, Political Affect, and Proliferation” by Dominic Pettman
  • ” I use this in as many class settings as possible. It’s a terrific list of concise statements that both introduce people to posthumanism and make important claims about technology and social formation. (Suggestion by K. Merinda Simmons)