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Tomoko Masuzawa (Michigan)

Tomoko Masuzawa received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1985 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 1999.  She is the author of In Search of Dreamtime: Quest for the Origin of Religion (Chicago, 1993) and The Invention of World Religions: or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005).  Additional publications include articles on Walter Benjamin (MLN, 1985), Emile Durkheim (Representations, 1988), Kafka and Dürrenmatt (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 1992), “Culture” (1998), James Hilton and Utopia (Positions, 1999), Discourse on Fetishism (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2000), F. Max Müller (2007), and Jonathan Z. Smith (2007). She has translated and edited a volume of seven major essays authored by leading contemporary Japanese scholars on the history of the discourse on religion (forthcoming). She is the recent recipient of the following fellowships: Getty Research Institute Visiting Scholar (2008), Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Science, 2010-2011), and Guggenheim (2010). She has been active in the North American Association for the Study of Religion (president, 2006-2009), American Academy of Religion (currently co-chair of the Cultural History of the Study of Religion Group), Society of Biblical Literature, and International Association for the History of Religions.  Ongoing projects include: a monograph on the heresy trial of W. Robertson Smith in the context of the history of biblical studies in the 19th century; monograph on the advent of academic secularity and the transformation of modern universities. Teaching interests in Comparative Literature include undergraduate courses on “Freud and Literature” and “Victorian Science, Religion, and Literature” and graduate seminars on “Writing History, Writing Criticism,” “Freud and the Origins of Poststructuralism,” “Comparison and Hegemony,” and “Origins of ‘Secular Humanism’.”

Major Works :

• The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion.Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

DaMaris Hill (University of Kentucky)


DaMaris B. Hill, PhD is a writer and academic. She has terminal degrees in English-Creative Writing and in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Hill serves as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland (2016), an edited collection of essays, and a 2015 chapbook of poems entitled \ Vi-zə-bəl \ \ Teks-chərs \(Visible Textures). Her memoir in verse about incarcerated black female writers, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing was recently published by Bloomsbury.
Similar to her creative process, Dr. Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary and examines the intersections between literary criticism, cultural studies, and digital humanities.  She has collaborated with other artists, such as Jennifer Rivera, in order to create companion paintings inspired by Hill's literary works.

Main Works:

• The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland (Lexington, 2016).
• A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing (Bloomsbury, 2019).