Tomoko Masuzawa
Tomoko Masuzawa is Professor of History and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She specializes in the history of the human sciences in the 19th and 20th century with a particular focus on the European academic discourses on religion. She is the author of In Search of Dreamtime: the Quest for the Origin of Religion (1993) and The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (2005), both published by the University of Chicago Press. She is currently working on a book-length study exploring the condition of secularity in the development of biblical studies in the 19th century, tentatively entitled The Promise of the Secular: William Robertson Smith and the Historical Constitution of Biblical Studies. Her other projects underway include a study of the transformation of European conceptions of religion, from “customs and ceremonies” to “belief systems,” with a special attention to Bernard Picart’s engravings in Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses des tous les peuples du monde (1723-37) and their reproduction and recirculation in the 19th century. She is also editing a volume entitled Genealogies of the Study of Religion.
Posts by Tomoko Masuzawa:
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
With the prevalence of voices casting doubts and aspersions on the so-called secularization thesis, we might imagine that the familiar story of the progress of Western modernity qua secularity is on its last legs, and that the notion of secularity itself is near bankruptcy. Upon closer inspection, however—and Charles Taylor’s latest tome provides an excellent occasion for such inspection—it appears that what is in jeopardy is the valence of “the secular,” and not the story of the long march of Western modernity itself. [...]
Read the rest of The burden of the great divide.
Posted in A Secular Age | 1 Comment » |
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