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From August 6-8, 2008, the International Symposium “From Ritual to Romance: Comparative Literature and Comparative Religious Studies” takes place in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Executive Board of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA). This association is composed of 40 national associations with more than 5000 members in total. An embedded panel “Religion and Literature” will also be held. 50 participants from 18 countries will attend; prominent speaker is Jacobs University's new Wisdom Professor for Comparative Religion, Hans Kippenberg.
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Aug
06, 2008]
The symposium explores the possible cooperation between the academic disciplines of “Comparative Literature” and “Comparative Religious Studies” and how this can clarify the long discussed relationship between the different genres and eras of world literature dealing with religious rituals and texts, for instance the evolution of literature from and its inspiration by religious story telling rituals.
A prominent speaker is the renowned expert on Religious Studies Prof. Dr. Hans G. Kippenberg, who since August 2008 holds a Wisdom Professorship for Comparative Religion at Jacobs University. The Bremen born scientist, who studied theology as well as Semitic languages and comparative religion at the universities of Marburg, Tübingen and Göttingen, received his doctoral degree in 1969 from the University of Leeds (GB). After his Habilitation in “History of Religions” at the Free University of Berlin he was appointed to the chair for Comparative Religion and History of Religions at the University of Groningen (NL) in 1977. In 1989 he returned to Bremen, where he was appointed to the new chair for the Theory and History of Religions at the University of Bremen until 2004.
Since 1998 he has been a Fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, University of Erfurt. He was a fellow, visiting professor or adjunct professor at various renowned universities or institutes, amongst them the Wissenschaftskolleg at Berlin, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the University of Chicago, USA, at the Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and the University of Groningen. From 1993 to 2001 he was the first and later on the second chairman of the German Association for the Study of Religions.
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