Religion and memory on the land
2021
“Plagues and Peoples: From Divine Intervention to Public Health,” taught jointly by Pamela Klassen, a professor in the department for the study of religion, and Janelle Taylor, a professor of anthropology, weaves together a curriculum that offers a historical, anthropological and religious perspective that compares pandemics from the bubonic plague and cholera to the 1918 flu epidemic, looking at how diseases impact society and how they change culture and politics.
“What does it mean to live through a world historic pandemic?” Klassen asks. “We are thinking about how stories matter for the course of a pandemic. We are asking students to observe what they see around them and consider how religion and culture shape the ways that epidemics reveal inequity as well as bring about solidarity.”
Read more here.
Elected to the Royal Society of Canada2019
Founded in the 1880s, the Royal Society of Canada recognizes scholars and their work in order to help them build a better future in Canada and around the world.
“My work has always been animated by – this is more grandiose than I want to make it sound – questions of injustice that I see around me and how religion plays into various kinds of inequality, or how religion shapes the political world in which we live,” Klassen says.
Read more here.
Fellows have made remarkable contributions in the arts, humanities and sciences and will be mobilized to contribute knowledge, understanding, and insight through engagement with the Canadian public.
2018
Amanda Porterfield writes for Reading Religion: “Klassen understands Du Vernet and his situation better than he did. Working a century later, she has heard more indigenous voices and been able to draw upon postcolonial scholarship and activism. Invoking the spirit of the 2015 report by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she overlooks no opportunity to expose the role that Christianity played in justifying colonization and rationalizing the seizure of indigenous lands. But she also pays close attention to the ways indigenous people worked with the material culture and ideas associated with Christianity to assert their own sovereign rights, preserve their societies, and contribute to the meaning of religion and spirituality in Canada, and indeed to the meaning of Canada itself.”
Read her review here.
2015
On the fifteenth of September 2015, I received the Anneliese Maier Research Award in Leipzig, Germany. For more information on the prize and the other prizewinners, see the Humboldt Foundation’s press release. More details about the first workshop Professor Monique Scheer and I organized can be found here.
2015
The Northrop Frye Award of Excellence for the integration of Research and Teaching recognizes those individuals or team of individuals who have enhanced the student experience through innovative curriculum, co-curricular learning, and pedagogical contributions inside and outside the classroom with a special focus on the integration of research and teaching. I received the award in 2015; read more here.
2015