[Discussion] NOTICE: Religion, Secularism and Cultural Studies (update)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Douglas Dowland <douglas-dowland@uiowa.edu>

**Please note that the deadline for submissions on this issue has been
extended to July 15, 2005.**

The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, a referred academic journal 
dedicated to
publishing cultural studies scholarship from both established and emerging
scholars, is currently soliciting submissions for an upcoming special 
issue on:

RELIGION, SECULARISM, AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Guest Editors: Lori Branch and Everett Hamner

Culture may be, as Raymond Williams informs us, "everyday," but as it is 
reified
in cultural studies practice, it is rarely religious. The Blackwell 
Companion to
Cultural Studies (2001), for instance, uncovers not a hint in 579 pages or a
detailed index that religion operates in culture at all: no prayer, no 
yoga, no
Religious Right, abstinence campaigns, televangelism, no daily practice of
Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. And this, despite 
the daily
news, world politics, and a cadre of critics hailing the "return of the
religious" to critical discourse. In her Presidential Address to the Modern
Language Association in December 2003, Mary Louise Pratt proclaimed the 
urgency
of the interdisciplinary study of religion in our literature 
departments. "Who
can doubt today," she asked, "the need to study secularism and 
religiosity from
every viewpoint we can muster?" As Stanley Fish has recently pointed out 
in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, the distinctions between reason and 
faith, truth
and belief, have been increasingly called into question in culture and 
academia,
and religion promises, in his words, to "succeed high theory and the 
triumvirate
of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the 
academy."

This special issue of The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies seeks to 
speak in and
to cultural studies' silence on religion and secularism, and to gain a 
critical
perspective on that silence and the reasons it has existed. This issue will
explore the conversations that can take place between cultural studies and
highlight the new outpouring of work from a variety of critical perspectives
that points toward vibrant engagement in the coming years with the 
historical
study of the mutual transformation of religion and secularism in modernity.

We solicit submissions on any aspect of religion, secularism, and cultural
studies, from any time period, literature, or media, and particularly 
those that
implicitly or explicitly address the following questions: What would a 
cultural
studies approach to religious texts, behaviors and artifacts look like? How
would this affect or challenge "secular" cultural studies? What is at 
stake in
the secular portrayal of everyday life created by the silence surrounding
religion in cultural studies? How can recent critical studies of the 
emergence
of secularism in modernity?

Please submit papers no later than 7/15/05 to:

Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 308 English-Philosophy Building 
University of
Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242-1492

Two hard copies of the manuscript and a disk, preferably in Microsoft Word,
should be provided. Manuscripts cannot be returned unless a self-addressed
envelope with US postage is provided. Submissions should be no longer 
than 30
pages and should be prepared following the MLA Style Manual.

For more information about contributing or subscribing to this journal, 
please
contact the managing editor at <ijcs_at_uiowa.edu>. The journal's web site,
which includes excerpts from previous issues, editorial board and other
information, is at: <www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs>.

Douglas Dowland
<douglas-dowland@uiowa.edu>