Brown University is presenting an upcoming conference titled “Beasts Monsters, and the Fantastic in the Religious Imagination.” The schedule from the website:

Friday, February 28, 2014

Keynote Address
6:30-7:30pm 

Dinner Reception
7:30pm 

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Breakfast
8am-9am

I. Morning Session: Doing Things with Demons
9am-10:45am 

“When a Bad Being Does Good Things: The Demon as the Unsung Hero of the Mahabharata”
Vishal Sharma (Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto)

“The Hellhound of the Qur’an: Investigations of a Dog at the Gate of the Underworld”
George Archer (Theology, Georgetown)

“Dangerous Demons and Savvy Sages: The non-human Other and rabbinic identity in Late Antiquity”
Sara Ronis (Religious Studies, Yale University)

“Mourning and the Malevolent: An Analysis of the Lament of Raksas Women in Valmiki’s Ramayana”
Grace MacCormick (M.A., Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto)

“Domesticating the Jinn: Sayyid Ahmad Kan’s Exegesis of the Quran”
Mian Muhammad Nauman Faizi (Ph.D., Scripture, Interpretation and Practice Program, Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia)

Break
10:45am-11am 

II.  Late Morning Session: The Politics of Composite Creatures
11am-12:15pm

“The Sea Monster Ketos as Jonah’s ‘Great Fish’ in Early Christian Art”
Mark D. Ellison (Ph.D., Early Christianity, Department of Religion, Vanderbilt University)

“Demonizing Dissent in Medieval Japan: Tengu and Religious Rhetoric in the Konjaku Monogatari”
Benjamin D. Cox, (Ph.D., Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin)

“Counterintuitive Mischwesen: A Cognitive Approach to the Iconography of Hybrid Creatures in the Ancient Near East”
Brett Maiden (Religion, Emory University)

Lunch Break
12:15pm-2pm 

III.  Afternoon Session: The Unnatural in Narrative and Art
2pm-3:30pm 

“Tolkien’s Fairy-Stories and Desmond’s Metaxu: On Secondary Belief and the Primary Ethos”
Michelle J. Falcetano (Department of Philosophy, Villanova University)

“‘And I knew there was a dead man in my room’: Haunting and Modernity in Industrial Pittsburgh”
Andrew McKee (Department of Religion, Florida State University)

“The Disenchanted Gothic: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as Religious Declension Narrative”
Don Jolly (M.A., Religion, New York University)

“Monstrous Religious Authority in the films of Paul Thomas Anderson”
Dana Logan (Ph.D., Religious Studies, University of Indiana-Bloomington)

Break
3:30pm-3:45pm 

IV. Late Afternoon Session: Bodies and Boundaries
3:45pm-5:15pm

“Barbarians Upon the Horizon: Ethnoreligious Difference in the Colonial Imagination”
Angel J. Gallardo (Ph.D., Relgion & Culture, Religious Studies, Southern Methodist University)

“Embodying Disordered Economy: A Study in Byzantine Theology”
Jessica Wong (Religion, Duke University)

“The Supernatural, Disability, and the Hermeneutics of Childbearing: Reading Martha Beck’s Expecting Adam”
Andrew Walker-Cornetta (M.A., Religious Studies, New York University)

“Reconsidering the Kapalika: Multiple Interpretations and Diversity in Hinduism Made Accessible by the Intriguingly Grisly”
Seth Ligo (Ph.D., Religion, Duke University)

Break
5:15pm-5:30pm 

Closing Remarks
5:30-6pm

Dinner Reception
6pm 

*Please note that this schedule is preliminary, and will be updated as additional information becomes available.