SPO graduate student Lucia Filipova and Eric Calderwood, Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently recorded a 15-minute podcast episode entitled “What does it mean to remember interreligious peace?,” which is part of the podcast series “Religion and the Moment of War.” 

Their contribution to Public Humanities addresses the idea of convivencia, a term closely linked to the historical period of al-Andalus in Medieval Spain, as well as other aspects of Spanish-Moroccan relations throughout history. Professor Calderwood affirms that we, as Cultural Studies scholars, can contribute to current debates related to religion and war by emphasizing that religion and religious identities never exist in a vacuum and, therefore, they cannot be divorced or understood separately from other forms of identity. This podcast episode is Lucia’s final project as a Graduate Fellow at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, which aims to show how academic perspectives can be useful to a wider public in times of conflict and political unrest. 

Listen to this episode as well as to the whole podcast series on Spotify.