This dissertation examines two major kingship rituals-- the coronation and the autumnal navaratri--as discussed in Hindu religious literature and ritual texts, and as practised in Nepal. These rituals are based on sacred ...

"Christian Slavery" shows how Protestant missionaries in the early modern Atlantic World developed a new vision for slavery that integrated Christianity with human bondage. Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries arrived ...

Maintaining a balanced approach to music is a shared challenge in all religions. Depending on the context in which music is used in religious activities, it is either praised as a powerful medium to please the divine or ...

This dissertation uses archival and ethnographic research to examine how the entrance of women into the Shinto priesthood in 1946 precipitated the formation of a gendered priesthood. Although more than 16% of the priesthood ...

This dissertation examines ḥaḍāna (custody law) in al-Andalus between the ninth and the early twelfth centuries. Through a close reading of Andalusi Mālikī legal works, I show how this body of law developed and evolved ...

This dissertation seeks to explain the rise of missionary activism to a place of cultural prominence in the early American republic from the 1780s, when missions were dilapidated holdovers of British philanthropy, to the ...

This dissertation tells a new story about the origins of the modern European social sciences. I set out to understand why the founders of French sociology and anthropology, including Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Claude ...

This dissertation presents the first extensive study in English of the eschatological and esoteric apocalypse titled The Tree of Nuʿmān Concerning the Ottoman Empire (al-Šağarah al-nu‘māniyya fī al-dawlah al-‘uthmāniyyah). ...