WELCOME
Welcome to the Study of Religion at Harvard University. We invite you to explore this website to find out more about our undergraduate and graduate programs, our faculty, and some of the contexts in which religion is studied at Harvard.
Religion is a dynamic and powerful force in shaping cultures and complex civilizations, so understanding religion is critical for many areas of study from art, literature, and music to history, politics, and public health. Studying religion is exciting and demanding. The history of religions is global in scope and invites us to study the languages and cultures of the world. The currents of religion today are swift and often turbulent and require the very best analysis of scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
Resources for the study of religion at Harvard are vast. We offer courses in the whole range of religious traditions from the ancient Zoroastrian tradition to modern Christian liberation movements, Islamic and Jewish philosophies, Buddhist social movements, and Hindu arts and culture. Some of us work primarily as historians, others as scholars of texts, others as anthropologists, although the boundaries of these methodologies are never firm. Some of us are adherents of a religious tradition; others are not at all religious. The Study of Religion is exciting and challenging precisely because of the conversations that take place across the complexities of disciplines, traditions, and intellectual commitments.
Courses in religion are offered in many departments –Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Anthropology, for example. Faculty members in these and other departments are affiliated with the Study of Religion. In addition, Harvard Divinity School has a wide-ranging faculty many of whose courses are cross-listed in the FAS Courses of Instruction.
Harvard’s programs in religious studies are distinctive for the intensive study of historical religious traditions and the insistence that such study is always, in some sense, comparative. Religious traditions have not developed in isolation, but in constant interaction with each other and in ever-new contexts.
For undergraduates, we offer an array of gateway courses introducing the Study of Religion. These lead to more specialized work in areas of the students’ own interests. For some, concentrating in The Comparative Study of Religion leads to graduate work and our graduates are professors at many major universities. For others, a religion major has led to careers in law, medicine, journalism, politics, and the non-profit sector.
For graduate students, the Committee on the Study of Religion offers the Ph.D. in a range of specialized areas. All graduate students take two common seminars, one on the history of “religion” as a subject of critical inquiry and one on contemporary conversations in the discipline of religious studies. As they move on to more specialized work, we expect our graduate students to continue thinking about how their areas of research contribute broadly to knowledge in the field.
Be sure to look at the related websites of Harvard Divinity School, which offers the Master of Divinity degree and both Masters and Doctoral degrees in Theological Studies; the Center for the Study of World Religions, which sponsors a stimulating program of events; the Women’s Studies in Religion Program which brings outstanding scholars to the Divinity School each year; and the Pluralism Project, which sponsors research on the changing religious landscape of America.
