Stories from the Mortuary: New Ways to Read and Tell Religious History

3 units

To read the archive, Saidiya Hartman says, is “to enter a mortuary.” In this mortuary, moments and emotions that once shaped a life—nervous anticipation on the first day of school, the tentative thrill of seeing a friend as something more, the grinding frustration of not getting a job, fervent prayers uttered in desperation, the searing grief of losing loved ones—are reduced to a sentence or two. The archive only permits “one final viewing,” offering a fleeting, partial glimpse of a life once lived full. What does this nature of the archive tell us about what we call “history”? How might our understanding of history shift when we attend to both the constraints and possibilities of the archive, exploring more diverse ways of using sources and creating narratives? When considering religious history, how can we also account for nonhuman presences and beliefs, as well as personal and collective memories? Throughout the course, we will examine the power and politics of the archive while discussing the use of unconventional sources, alternative interpretive frameworks, and creative approaches to writing religious history. Drawing on methods ranging from oral histories to critical fabulation, we will foreground historically marginalized individuals as well as “unseen” forces such as religious beliefs, emotions, and memories. We will read works by scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Saidiya Hartman, Tiya Miles, Robert Orsi, Solimar Otero, and more. This course is primarily discussion-based, encouraging hands-on learning experiences and close engagement with primary sources. We will visit the university archives, the State Historical Society of Missouri, and a religious institutional archive. We will complete a primary-source analysis project of their choice, along with a final research paper or a creative “unessay” that may take various forms, including a podcast episode, a series of TikTok videos, a visual art piece, a short story, and more. This course is scheduled as a three-hour session to support research-based learning and archival instruction, which require extended, uninterrupted time for orientation, material retrieval, supervised handling, and guided research practice. The course also highlights project-based and collaborative learning through in-class discussion, group analysis of primary sources, and guided research activities, all of which benefit from sustained engagement.