Tomoko Masuzawa
After earning her Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1985, Masuzawa began her career at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she was Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and member of the Program in Social Theory and Cross-Cultural Studies. She currently holds a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Program of Comparative Literature, at the University of Michigan, where her course topics include European intellectual history and critical theory. Her research, which could be characterized as meta-theoretical, concentrates on the historical development of the nineteenth- and early twentieth century search for the origin of religion and the history and politics of the categories "religion" and "world religions."
Major Works
In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion
(1993)
"Culture"
in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies (1998)
"Origin" in Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to
the Study of Religion (1999)
"From Empire to Utopia: Effacement of Colonial Markings in Lost Horizon"
in Positions: East Asia Cultural Critique (1999)
The Invention of World Religions or, How European Universalism Was
Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (2005)
Quotation
"In the social sciences and humanities alike, 'religion' as a category
has been left largely unhistoricized, essentialized, and tacitly presumed
immune or inherently resistant to critical analysis. The reasons for this
failing on the part of the academy, this general lack of analytic interest,
and the obstinate opacity of the subject of religion, are no doubt many
and complex. But the complexity may begin to yield to critical pressure
if we are to subject this discursive formation as a whole to a different
kind of scrutiny, a sustained and somewhat sinuous historical analysis."
- from Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (2005)
Select Web Resources on Masuzawa
University
of Chicago Press site for In Search of Dreamtime
University
of Chicago Press site for The Invention of World Religions
"From Empire to Utopia: Effacement of Colonial Markings in Lost Horizon"
in Positions: East Asia Cultural Critique (1999)
Abstract
of Masuzawa's Plenary Address to the 19th Congress of the International
Association for the History of Religions, March 2005
Secondary Literature on Masuzawa and Religion
Review symposium (including reviews by Ivan Strenski, Victoria Lee
Erickson, and James DiCenso, and a response by Masuzawa) on In Search
of Dreamtime in Method
and Theory in the Study of Religion, vol. 8/3 (1996)