The debated relationship between secularization, religion, and the postsecular has now been established as a key area of inquiry for contemporary literary studies and theory. Yet this inquiry has largely functioned as a textual hermeneutic, one that has opened new ways of understanding the complex engagements of texts with religion and secularity. Such a focus on interpretation is in one sense understandable, given the literary and cultural objects at the center of our discipline. But, in another sense, it is perhaps surprising, since so much of the central work in studies of secularization, from Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, has been preoccupied with the ways institutions shape the production and categorization of knowledge and selfhood as “secular” or “religious.” While there have been attempts to promote inquiry into how institutional identities in higher education shape interpretive practices, pedagogy, and knowledge production - Michael Warner’s “Uncritical Reading” (2004), Michael Kaufmann’s “The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies” (2007), or Lori Branch’s “The Rituals of Our Re-Secularization” (2014) - these institutional forces have remained largely invisible, unstudied and unspoken. At the same time, they have remained deeply formative of our teaching and research.

This roundtable seeks to ask questions about the workings of these often invisible forces by reflecting on how the institutional identities of secular and religious universities and colleges shape practices of pedagogy and the production of knowledge. We hope to advance ongoing conversations about secularity, religion, and the postsecular by vigorously discussing their institutional formations in the contemporary divides between secular and religious colleges and universities, with a focus on how these institutional formations and divides have shaped teaching, scholarship, and advising.

How do different institutional commitments, governing documents, and self-understandings as well as campus cultures and constituencies implicitly and explicitly limit or shape what can be taught and published at each kind of institution? What are these limits and how have scholars and teachers navigated, challenged, and/or adapted to them? What kind of discursive spaces might be opened between and beyond the secular/religious institutional divide? As they offer preliminary reflections on these broader questions, our roundtable speakers will specifically raise a range of experiences that occur in teaching and scholarship that happens along, between, and beyond the secular/religious divide, including:

• The pressures and opportunities of teaching literary theory at a conservative Baptist college in the context of COVID-19.
• Working within and beyond Catholic-centric vocabulary and assumptions to study other religious beliefs and traditions at a prominent Catholic university.
• Ideas of “mission” at secular and religious universities and how they shape an institution’s social imaginary.
• How student religious cultures shape and limit pedagogy at a regional Catholic liberal arts university.
• How the religious/secular divide influences the undergraduate and graduate English PhD job market and advising about life after graduate school.
• How secular institutions might surprisingly open spaces for deeper inquiry into Indigenous religious studies in the context of two-year colleges and universities.

Through these particular experiences and the larger questions of secularity and religion that they speak to, this roundtable affords both nuanced and comprehensive views of the question of secular and religious institutional forces. The richly various institutional experiences of our panelists as well as their many current institutional locations and stages in the profession show that questions of secularity and religion are field-wide, impacting and shaping all kinds of higher education institutions. Our speakers include graduate students at both elite secular and elite religious institutions, associate professors at regional religious liberal arts institutions, faculty at a nationally-ranked religious university, and faculty at a secular two-year technical college.

A unifying concern of the panel will be to think of how moving beyond a secular/religious institutional divide might afford new and less culturally antagonistic ways of thinking about teaching, knowledge production, advising, and institutional self-understanding. Our concern to move past the secular/religious divide would build on work by Kaufmann, Branch, Tracy Fessenden, and José Casanova, among others, that has sought to productively trouble the abiding distinction between the secular and the religious.

Our roundtable consists of one presider and six speakers, who will offer very brief reflections that will then allow the majority of time for audience participation and conversation. By engaging questions of secular and religious institutional identity, as well as their complicated relationships, this panel hopes to attract a broad audience, from scholars at each type of institution, to those scholars interested in the burgeoning fields of postsecularism and secularization studies.