News

The Portland Center for Public Humanities has just received a $425,000 grant in collaboration with three other international centers.  The Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging (RelSec) project will link four CHCI member organizations (at Portland State University, Utrecht University, Tel Aviv University, and the  Chinese University of Hong Kong) through a mutually coordinated set of research programs. The project’s key research questions are: How are we to understand the contemporary resurgence of religious discourses, social practices and forms of cultural organization in political arenas, civil society and the public sphere? What light do these developments cast on long-standing accounts of “modernity” as a secularizing historical process? How are current formations of religious and secular shaping local, national, transnational and “universal” measures of political belonging?  The Portland Center for Public Humanities is the lead institution for this three-year grant and will be reporting to the CHCI on its progress.  Lee Medovoi is the principal investigator for the project.  Other members of the English department involved in the project include John Smyth, Marcia Klotz, Joel Bettridge, and Bill Knight.