Institute of Historical and Cultural Anthropology

Prof. Pamela Klassen

Contact
University of Toronto, Department for the Study of Religion
170 St George Street
Toronto, ON M5R 2M8
p.klassenspam prevention@utoronto.ca
Website: http://religion.utoronto.ca/people/faculty/pamela-klassen/
and: http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/pklassen/

Office hours in Tübingen TBA

Research Interests

  • Anthropology of religion
  • Religion, healing, and medicine
  • Religious diversity in North America in historical and contemporary perspectives
  • Women, gender, and religion
  • Ritual and ritual theory
  • Narrative and life writing
  • Religion and the secular

Vita

Pamela Klassen has taught at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto since 1997 and was named Full Professor with a cross-appointment in the Department of Anthropology in 2011. In 2013 she became an Elected Member of the American Society for the Study of Religion; in 2012 she was given the Award of Excellence in Analytical-Descriptive Studies by the American Academy of Religion for her book, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). In 2004/05 she was in Tübingen on a Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship and returned in 2010-11 as a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology in Tübingen.

In 2015, Pamela Klassen was awarded the Anneliese Maier Research Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

University of Tübingen - Press Release 
Website Anneliese Maier Research Prize 
Pamela Klassen wins major German grant

Teaching

Prof. Klassen taught a seminar at the Ludwig Uhland Institute in the summer semester of 2015:

Museums and Material Religion (Seminar for the modules M5, M6, M7, B6.1, B6.2, B11.1, B11.2, B12.2)
Tue, 21. April, 10-12 und 14-16 h
Wed, 22. April, 10-12 h
Thu, 23. April, 10-12 und 14-16 h
Tue, 28. April, 10-12 und 13-18 h (excursion)
Wed, 29. April, 10-12 h
Thu, 30. April, 10-12 und 14-16 h

The seminar was open to graduate (Master’s and PhD) and advanced undergraduates from all departments.

Selected Publications

Books
2011 Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2010 After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, co-edited with Courtney Bender. New York:Columbia University Press.
2009 Women and Religion: Critical Concepts, 4 vols. with Shari Golberg and Danielle Lefebvre. London and New York: Routledge.
2001 Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 316 pp.
1994 Going by the Moon and the Stars: Stories of Two Russian Mennonite Women. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 151 pp.
Articles
2014 “Making Religion Mental: A Response to Birgit Meyer's `Mediation and the Genesis of Presence´” Religion and Society, Volume 5, pp. 231-237.
2014 “Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular; or How Real is Real Estate?” In: Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, and Eva Midden (eds.): Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere. Postsecular Publics. Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 175-194.
2014 “The Politics of Protestant Healing: Theoretical Tools for the Study of Spiritual Bodies and the Body Politic” Spiritus 14(1, Spring): 67-75.
2013 “Christianity as a Polemical Concept” for The Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, eds. Michael Lambek and Janice Boddy, Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 344-362.
2013 “Material Witnesses: Women and the Mediation of Christianity” co-authored with Kathryn Lofton, in Mia Lövheim, ed., Media, Religion, and Gender. New York: Routledge, 52-65.
2012 “Saint as Cipher: Paul and the Politics of Ritual Repudiation”, co-authored with John Marshall, in History of Religions, 51(4, May), 344-363.
2012 “Religion and Myths of Nationhood in Canada and Mexico in the Twenty-first Century.” Concluding Essay in The Cambridge History of Religions in America: Volume III: 1945 to the Present, ed. Stephen J. Stein, Cambridge University Press, pp.719-745.
2008 “Practice” in Keywords in the Study of Media and Religion, ed. David Morgan, New York: Routledge, pp. 136-147.
2008 “Ritual” The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, Ed. John Corrigan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 143-161.