This year for the 2010-11 Lester Lectureship the Religious Studies Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder has the privilege to host Dr. Ananda Abeysekara. The lectureship has been organized by Dr. Ruth Mas, professor of Contemporary Islam in the Religious Studies Department and Affiliated Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, and consists of a graduate panel of student fellows. Preceding Dr. Abeysekara’s visit this panel will be involved in weekly seminars designed to critically and creatively engage his most recent publication, The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures. During each weekly seminar discussion group leaders will elucidate significant concepts from this work and examine the voices of Abeysekara’s interlocutors.


The question of political and religious identity as it is constructed in monastic institutions and set in opposition to society at large is one important example of how Abeysekara has framed the issues of power, self-definition, and violence in Buddhist culture. His work runs parallel to such contemporary theorists and philosophers as Talal Asad, Alasdair McIntyre, and David Scott. And similar to these scholars his theoretical models are strongly influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, as well as other notable post-modernists. Further, Abeysekara is in discourse with such leaders in the field of Buddhist identity, political discourse, and ritual expression as S.J. Tambiah and Gananath Obeyesekere. For all these reasons, we engage his work as a highly relevant contribution to the study of past and present articulations of power and identity in post-colonial South and Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions. In the broader context of Religious Studies, Abeysekara has raised pertinent questions concerning the tools of analytical inquiry, how scholars employ theories of analysis, interpretation, and critique. With all this in mind, the aims of this lectureship are simple: To engage the discourse of a scholar who is helping to shape the future of our field, to contend with the same concepts by which he is occupied, and, to not defer our debates and conversations to any other time than now.

The Lester Lectureship

The Department of Religious Studies at CU-Boulder established the Lester Lecture
upon the retirement of Prof. Robert Lester, with the intention of bringing to the campus
scholars who would address current issues in the academic study of religion. In the past,
we have hosted scholars such as Amy Hollywood, Thomas Tweed, Tomoko Masuzawa,
Russell McCutcheon and others.

This year, Ananda Abeysekera has accepted our invitation. He is most recently the
author of The Politics of Post-Secular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Columbia
University Press, 2008 as well as Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity and Difference,
University of South Carolina University Press, 2002, which won the American Academy
of Religion Award for the Best First Book in the History of Religion. His interests
include: Theravada Buddhism; Sri Lanka; Buddhism and Modernity; South Asian
Religions and Questions of Translation and Memory; Religion and the Untranslatability
of Life; Religion, Theory, and Limits of Secular Critique; Religion and Secularism;
Philosophical Theory and Political Philosophy; Derrida, Heidegger, and Hegel,
Postcolonial Theory and Limits of Historicism; Animality, Race, and Religion. In his
most recent work Abeysekara considers the aporias of the supposed inherited present and
in light of such impasses suggests significant revisions in how theoretical analysis must
proceed.
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