CRPC PARTICIPATION IN NEWCASTLE, AUSTRALIA CONFERENCE

Dr Michael Hoelzl, Director of the Centre for Religion and Political Culture at the University of Manchester, will be a speaker at a symposium in Newcastle, Australia, in July 2013. The symposium, hosted by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Newcastle, Australia, is entitled "Political Religion in Secular Australia", and forms part of the Religion in Political Life Research Programme.

Other speakers include Professor Graham Ward, formerly also part of the CRPC at the University of Manchester, and now Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford.

More information about the symposium is available at 

http://www.newcastle.edu.au/institute/humanities-research/programmes-of-research/ripl/symposiums.html

Religion and Modernity in a Secular City Open Registration

Registration is now open for the Religion and Modernity in a Secular City postgraduate conference, which will take place this coming 16-18 September at the Katholische Akademie in Berlin. The keynote speaker will be Professor Graham Ward, who will also engage in a public panel discussion with Dr. Ataullah Siddiqui of the Markfield Institute of Higher Education, and Professor Rolf Schieder of Humbolt University.

The language of the conference will be English, and the conference will take place in the centre of Berlin at the Katholische Akademie.

The registration form can be downloaded by clicking here, and the official programme for the conference can be downloaded by clicking here. The conference fee is €60 which includes lunch from Thursday to Saturday. Accommodation can also be booked at the conference venue through the registration form, however spaces are limited so do register soon.

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Fascinatingly Disturbing

Dr. Michael Hoelzl has contributed to a newly released book on Michael Haneke's work entitled, Fascinatingly Disturbing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Michael Haneke's Cinema, edited by Alexander D. Ornella and Stefanie Knauss. Here's a brief extract from the back cover:

Michael Haneke is one of Europe’s most successful and controversial film directors. Awarded the Palme d’Or and numerous other international awards, Haneke has contributed to and shaped contemporary auteur cinema and is becoming more and more popular among academics and cinephiles. His mission is as noble as it is provocative: he wants to "rape the audience into independence," to wake them up from the lethargy caused by the entertainment industry. e lmic language he employs in this mission is both highly characteristic and ecient, and yet his methods are open to criticism for their violence toward and manipulation of the audience. e aim of this book is to analyze critically Haneke’s aesthetics, his message, as well as his ethical motivation from an interdisciplinary and intercultural perspective. Contributors to the book come from a variety of academic disciplines and cultural backgrounds-European and North American.

Religion and Modernity in a Secular City

Call for Papers: The Religion and Modernity in a Secular City postgraduate conference will take place this coming 16-18 September at the Katholische Akademie in Berlin. The conference is being organized by the K. Akademie in conjunction with the Centre for Religion and Political Culture at the University of Manchester, and the Program on Religion, Politics and Economics at Humboldt University. Further details can be found by clicking here. The following is an abstract from the conference website:

Writing from Vichy, France in early 1940, Walter Benjamin articulated what many theologians secretly feared in his Über den Begriff der Geschichte by portraying theology as the hunchback that must keep out of sight. However, Slavoj Žižek has recently suggested that it is time to reverse Benjamin’s first thesis on the philosophy of history: “The puppet called ‘theology’ is to win all the time.” This startling reversal reveals that the extent to which Enlightenment secularization imagined it could map the rational world onto a manipulable grid, manifested in the global spread of political, economic and social structures that have attempted to inscribe the sacred within a strictly private sphere, is increasingly being called into question by the continuing public presence of political theologies. However, the question of what this new visibility of religion might mean in the context of the supposedly secular city remains less than clear. We invite proposals for papers, to be delivered in no more than 30 minutes, that address this broad theme from theology, philosophy, political theory, economics, sociology, as well as cultural and biblical studies. The keynote speaker will be Professor Graham Ward.

The language of the conference will be English. Abstracts of no more than 300 words, together with a CV, should be sent simultaneously to both the conference organizers via email no later than 30 April 2010. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 14 May 2010. The conference will take place in the centre of Berlin at the Katholische Akademie. Generous grants are available for presenters to cover the costs of registration, accommodation and meals. 

For further information please contact the conference organizers at the following addresses: 

• Martin Knechtges: knechtges@katholische-akademie-berlin.de
• Kyle Gingerich Hiebert: kyle.gingerichhiebert@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Poster (PDF)

Winter 2010 Doctoral Seminar

This coming week we'll be hosting our next doctoral seminar. Paper topics are listed below. Click here for a PDF of abstracts. 

• Apocalypse and Forgetting in Russell T. Davies’ Doctor Who, by Andy Crome
• Martyn on Galatians 3:27-8 by Steven Mcbay
• The Problem of ‘Religious Experience’ with Reference to Soren Kierkegaard and Muhammad Iqbal by Sevcan Mirik
• Imagining the End of History with Hegel by Clare Greer
• Derrida and Supplementary Writing by Mohsen Ghasemi
• The Ideologised Middle by Theodros Teklu
• Metz on Dangerous Memory by Kyle Gingerichhiebert
• Educating for Tolerance, Remembering to Forget by Ruth Hadley

MA and PhD Funding Deadline

Good news for students interested in applying for MA and PhD programmes in the Centre for Religion and Political Culture and the Lincoln Theological Institute. A number of funding opportunities have recently been announced within the University of Manchester's application framework.  

The first thing to be aware of is that 5pm on 1 March, 2011 is the current application deadline for funding specifically for the Religions and Theology Subject Area's new and existing students. Complete applications for a place on either the MA or the PhD must be received by 15 February 2011. Further details on all Religions and Theology specific awards can be found by clicking here and here. Further details on awards at University level and other funding bodies can be found by clicking here.

There are two prominent awards in particular which deserve special mention. Firstly, for UK/EU students, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has allocated two PhD studentships to the Religions and Theology Subject Area at the University of Manchester. This award covers the cost of tuition and maintenance. For overseas students, the Overseas Research Studentship (ORS) is now an internal University of Manchester award, of which there are two available to students in the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures. This award covers the difference between the cost of overseas tuition and UK/EU tuition. Students who win an ORS award will also be considered for the Religions and Theology Subject Area Home Fees bursary which, if awarded, would cover the remaining EU/UK fees. 

If you are interested in applying for these awards, you must submit the funding application form which is available by clicking here (DOC) (further details within the document itself). This form will then be considered alongside your submission of the University of Manchester online application for the MA or PhD programme of your choice. If you have any questions feel free to email us by clicking here.