Animals, Trees, and the Unseen

Harvard FAS

This course considers how we can write histories of religious animals and the Unseen. Students will be introduced to academic literature that has criticized scholarly and popular conceptions of humans having a special status, and assumptions that the religious sentience of non-human animals and the materiality of spirits cannot be studied academically. Students will then be introduced to a variety of sources containing rich information on religious animals and the supernatural from Islamic…