Alexandra Grieser

Biography

Alexandra Grieser adds to the programme on religion at TCD from the angle of the cultural study of religion. Being trained in the academic study of religion, in general rhetoric and in German literature in Tuebingen and Munich, Germany, she also worked at the University of Bremen, at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. In her PhD, she investigated “changing plausibility patterns in modern religion” (Transformations of Immortality, 2008), addressing the larger question what kind of theoretical concepts we need in order to understand recent religious pluralism and religious change.

Research Interest

As Professor for the Theory of Religion, Alexandra focusses on the diversity of approaches, theories and methods applied in the Academic Study of Religion, and on the disciplinary history of this subject as well. Her teaching and research fields include European religious pluralism, the history of knowledge, and the interaction between religion and other societal sub-systems such as politics, art, literature, or science. A special focus of her work lies on the newly emerging Aesthetics of Religion, referring to the Greek notion of aisthesis (sensory perception) rather than to the philosophy of art and beauty. This approach starts from the assumption that religions are not confined to beliefs, institutions and theological doctrines; rather, it asks how religions cultivate emotions, attitudes and the body and the senses and how religious ways of “perceiving the world” come to influence social aesthetics in a larger culture. Alexandra is a founding member of the German working group for the Aesthetics of Religion, and a member of the DFG-funded network AESToR.net (see http://aestor.net/). An edited volume on this approach brings together scholars from diverse European countries, the US and Australia who are using aesthetics as a concept to understand better the intensity and persistence of religion throughout history and in the modern world (Alexandra Grieser and Jay Johnston (eds), 2017. Aesthetics of Religion: a Connective Concept, Berlin and Boston, de Gruyter. A previous research project concentrated on the relationships between religion and science, particularly on the popular usage of scientific imagery and the aesthetic ideologies thatgo along with the sensory aspects of different knowledge cultures. Future plans comprise an aesthetic analysis of recently developing “new universalisms” (Global aesthetics—Global religion?), which should provide a fresh view on religion, media and the divide between the religious and the secular.