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By Root 433 0

and teaching agenda needs to be considerably extended. Imagine how different our world might be if the people making financial decisions that impact all of our lives had studied not merely mathematical models but also history, literature, sociology, political science, anthropology and, yes, even religion. I would bet my retirement account that if Wall Streeters had read and understood Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” William Gaddis’s JR, Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money and Karl Marx’s Early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, we would not find ourselves in our current economic mess.

These examples give some idea of the kind of work that could be done in new Emerging Zones. I believe large changes are needed, but realistically we have to begin modestly. The study of religion is a microcosm of broader challenges facing higher education. The problem of how to break down the walls separating eight subfields in the Department of Religion at Columbia is identical to the question of how to devise programs and structures to overcome departmental and disciplinary divisions in the broader university. During the past three years, we have redesigned the department in a way that suggests a model for a broader reform of higher education. We have begun by developing interdisciplinary programs in five zones of inquiry: Time and Modernities, Space, Transmission, Body and Media. In implementing these zones, we are bringing together people working in all the subfields of the department as well as colleagues in English, Philosophy, History, Anthropology, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies and even colleagues at other institutions like the American Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim Museum and the University of Copenhagen Business School. The description of the Media Zone illustrates how we have defined these new areas of inquiry.

Media

(Literary, Visual, Auditory, Physical, Transportation, Information and Communication Networks)

Experience is always mediated by technologies that are constantly changing. This focus area examines how religious experience, thought, action and institutions are related to different technologies of production and reproduction. “Media” is understood in the broadest possible sense: visual (painting, sculpture, mosaics, film, photography, architecture), auditory (music, ritual, spirits), physical (bodily disciplines and practices, material factors—food, drugs, etc.), transportation (land, sea, air), information and communication (writing, mechanical, electronic, digital) and networks (social, political, economic, technological). The primary concern of inquiry in this area is to determine the ways in which religious beliefs and practices shape media and, correlatively, the impact of different media on religious ideas and life.

Graduate students still concentrate in one tradition or subfield but now are required to study with professors and graduate students working in other areas by taking courses and conducting research in one of the five zones. In a media seminar, for example, a student working on nineteenth-century American spirituality might explore the way occult religious beliefs and practices influenced Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone; a student working on Byzantine theology might develop a multimedia project comparing the visual and psychological effect of church mosaics to the impact of the most recent virtual reality technology; a student studying Islam might compare the use of tape recorders by Muslims in Nigeria to the use of technology by American Christian fundamentalists; and a student working on Tibetan Buddhism might analyze research on meditation that is currently being conducted by neuroscientists. At the undergraduate level, a course like Real Fakes would work well in the Media Zone. Other examples might include a course on the relationship between twentieth-century French literature and film, the impact of iron-and-glass architecture and the rise of arcades and department stores on nineteenth-century literature