2025 Plenary Sessions and Panels

Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies program at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (June 2019) which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention award, 2021 Public Anthropologist Award, and Advocate of the Year Award 2021. She has been featured in the Femilist 2021, a list of 100 women from the Global South working on critical issues. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited 2020),  Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Upenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection “The Frame” and another collection is forthcoming. Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Ather is also a co-editor of Cultural Anthropology.

Abstract:

This talk analyzes the politics of religious rites and burial denial in Indian-occupied Kashmir. Zia explores how the Indian state uses burial denial and disrupts or bans religious rites as a form of state-driven religious and spiritual control. As Zia will show, the Indian state weaponizes religious rites and mourning practices to assert dominance over Kashmiri Muslims. 

Amy L. Balogh, Ph.D., is lecturer of religious studies at Regis University, where she won the 2021 Dean’s Award for Research Excellence in the School for Professional Advancement for her work on the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East. She also works as the editorial assistant for Gorgias Press, where she manages Gorgias 360, an initiative that provides libraries and scholars around the globe access to vital contributions to the humanities from publishers outside North America and Europe. Amy also serves as the academic editor for the Lexham Geographic Commentary Series and co-hosts the Biblical World podcast. She recently co-edited the volume A New Era of Comparison in Biblical Studies: Case Studies in Applied Methodology (Lexington Books, 2025) and is the author of Moses among the Idols: Mediators of the Divine in the Ancient Near East (Lexington Books / Fortress Press, 2018), as well as various articles in renowned journals, such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, and Critical Research on Religion. She also served as the founding president of the Religion & Bible Society of the Rocky Mountain Great Plains Region.

Abstract:

The mythology of other times and places is strange, so we often fail to see familiar stories as myth. This has led to grievous errors in how the Bible is understood and presented, but that is slowly beginning to change with advances in a variety of fields. Because it is becoming more common to view myth as a component of religion (and the Bible) rather than a distant religion that “others” practice, myth and myth theory are becoming increasingly relevant to the study of religion, particularly the sacred narratives in which people create and find meaning. In this talk, Dr. Balogh presents insights from myth theory that are useful to scholars in the fields of biblical and religious studies and applies them to perhaps the most familiar myth of all: the Garden of Eden. In so doing, we see how the collective agrarian experiences of the ancient Israelites informed their process of making meaning of those experiences through story telling. We also learn that if we take myth seriously and Bible-as-myth seriously, it opens a new world of interpretive possibilities that value not only ancient voices but modern ones as well.