Material Texts: Religion, Mobility, and Responsibility Editors' Introduction to this Special Issue of Textual Cultures

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Elizabeth A. Cecil
Sonia Hazard

Abstract

This special issue of Textual Cultures features the work of seven scholars of religion working on material texts across regions, periods, and religious traditions. Mostly focusing on contexts in the global South, the authors challenge Eurocentric narratives about the production, circulation, and reception of texts. Centered on the keywords mobility and responsibility, they suggest the ongoing relevance of paradigms that emphasize textual mobilities and contribute to conversations about scholarly responsibilities to our objects of study.

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Essays
Author Biographies

Elizabeth A. Cecil, Florida State University

Elizabeth A. Cecil is Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. Her scholarship explores the history of Hindu traditions in South and Southeast Asia through the study of text, image, monument, and landscape. She is the primary Research Collaborator in the ERC project ‘PURANA: Mythical Discourse and Religious Agency in the Puranic Ecumene’ and co-editor-in-chief of the open access journal PURANA Media. Cecil’s publications include Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India (2020) and the edited volume Primary Sources and Asian Pasts (2021). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Getty Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). With Sonia Hazard, Cecil co-directs the ‘More-than-human Religion’ project.

Sonia Hazard, Florida State University

Sonia Hazard, an assistant professor of Religion at Florida State University, focuses on religions in early national and antebellum US history, and media, material texts, and new materialisms. Her first book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (in 2025). Questions about media and its consequences in the context of US empire continue to inform her current book project, Christianity and the Book in the Cherokee Diaspora, 1821– 1861, supported by a fellowship at the National Humanities Center. With Elizabeth Cecil, Hazard co-directs the ‘More-than-human Religion’ project.