About
Founded in 1891 to encourage path-breaking scholarship through a lecture and book series, the American Lectures in the History of Religions flourished under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies and Columbia University from 1936. At the request of the ACLS, the American Academy of Religion assumed administrative responsibility for the series in 1994.
Recent Lecturers
2022 Lecturer: Daisy Machado, Latinx Religion at the Borderlands (Los Angeles, CA, September 27-29) | Video
2019 Lecturer: Jeffrey Stout, The Cinematic Sacred (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Greensboro, and Winston Salem, NC, February 18–27, 2019)
2016 Lecturer: Fatemeh Keshavarz, Unsilencing the Sacred: Poetic Conversations with the Divine (Notre Dame, Indiana and Chicago, Illinois, October 24–28, 2016) | Final Lecture Video | Radio Rumi Podcast
2014 Lecturer: Catherine L. Albanese, In an American Kaleidoscope: Revisiting Two Centuries of American Religious History (Atlanta, Georgia, April 7–11, 2014)
2013 Lecturer: John G. Gager, Jr., Winners and Losers in the Making of Early Christianity (Atlanta, Georgia, April 1–5, 2013)
Publications
At the conclusion of the lectures, many of the lecturers have had their lectures published through Columbia University Press.
Some of these publications are:
John G. Gager, Who Made Early Christianity?: The Jewish Lives of the Apostle Paul (2015)
Bruce Lawrence, New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life (2002)
Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (1998)
Caroline Walker Bynum, Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (1995)
W.H. McLeod, The Sikhs: History, Religion, and Society (1989)
Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988)
Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (1982)
Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978)
Philip H. Ashby, Modern Trends in Hinduism (1974)
Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament (1971)
Joseph L. Blau, Modern Varieties of Judaism (1966)
Joseph M. Kitagawa, Religion in Japanese History (1966)
Robert Lawson Slater, World Religions and World Community (1963)
R. M. Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity (1959)
Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions (1958)
Wing-tsit Chan, Religious Trends in Modern China (1953)
Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion (1948)
Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Popular Religion (1940)
The lecture series operates under the auspices of the AAR’s American Lectures in the History of Religions Committee.