The UiB Literature & Religion Research Group provides an inclusive forum for all levels of researchers who are working on aspects of literature and religion in a variety of institutes and departments. We seek to probe the interfaces of writing and belief across broad spectrums of time, geography, and language: from ancient Egypt to modern England, from medieval Arabic to early modern German, from occult alchemical texts to colonial American Puritan texts. By bringing into conversation our work on seemingly disparate peoples and places we aim to gain new ways of understanding how literature and religion intersect.
Open to interested scholars from any field - religious studies, literature, history, archaeology, etc - this research group will enable the kind of reflection that results from learning about different cutting-edge approaches to similar material. How can formal literary methods energize theological discourse, for instance? How can theories of religion refresh poetics? What new frontiers of understanding can be opened by reaching outside our individual disciplines? The interdisciplinary setting will encourage new questions and different challenges to established theories and methodologies.
Through various forms of scholarly conversations, this research group will forge new connections throughout and beyond UiB, in order to nurture innovative scholarship and a constructive scholarly community.
