Laura Snell

Area:

Religion of the Americas/East Asian Religion/Japanese American Religion; Shinto in the United States, secularism, space/place, visual and material culture, transpacific

Office:

HSSB 3069

Office Hours:

Tuesday 1-4pm (Beginning Oct 15th)

Time Period: Fall Quarter 2024

Email:

laurasnell@ucsb.edu

About:

External Co-President of the UCSB Graduate Student Association

Religious Studies Department Graduate-Faculty Liaison

Co-Chair Asian American Religion Unit AAR West

Currently soliciting papers for AAR West 2025! Please send submissions to laurasnell@ucsb.edu or shannon_toribio@ucsb.edu

MAR Yale Divinity School

BFA, BA Randolph College

Upcoming Events

Apr

Tue

2025

4:00 pm Cordano Lecture: Light Space, Go... @ HSSB 4080

Cordano Lecture: Light Space, Go... @ HSSB 4080

Apr 29 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Prof. Lynn Huber, Powell Professor of Religious Studies, Elon University Depicted by John as kaleidoscopic and colorful, the heavenly throne room in the Book of Revelation (written in the first century CE) often gets represented[...]

May

Tue

2025

5:00 pm Michaelsen Lecture: Alexis Wells... @ HSSB 1174

Michaelsen Lecture: Alexis Wells... @ HSSB 1174

May 27 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Inventing Tituba: Enslaved Women, “Witchcraft,” and Racial Gender-Making in the Early Atlantic An enslaved woman of indigenous Caribbean or South American descent racialized as African in later decades, Tituba is the figure through whom race[...]

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16 Jan

Join us on 2/18 at 5:00pm for a panel on "Chaplaincy & Spiritual Care in the 21st Century: A Healthcare Perspective," feat. the Spiritual Care Team at SB Cottage Health. SBPL (Faulkner Gallery). See website for details. Free and open to all!
https://www.cappscenter.ucsb.edu/news/event/496

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4 Feb

Join us on 2/12 at 4:00pm for a panel on "Repatriation Futures at UCSB & Beyond," feat. local, national, and global repatriation and burial protection experts. UCSB Betty Elings Wells Pavilion (Faculty Club). See website for details. Free and open to all!
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4 Feb

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Statement

The Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara stands in support of the protests for racial justice and police reform. Black lives matter.

We commonly hear that “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” This sentiment echoes in the national response to the current health crisis, where thousands and thousands have died and continue to die daily.

Our expertise lies in the academic study of the world’s religions. Each emphasizes the sanctity of life. In Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, human life is holy because God is holy (Lev 19:4; Qur’an 5:32, 6:131; 1 Corinthians 3:16). In the Buddhist tradition, the first and foremost precept is the prohibition against taking life (any life, not only human); at the same time, the human condition is unique and precious because Buddhas can only appear in human form. In religious traditions of the African Diaspora, Black gods and ancestors rise up to defend Black and Latinx lives in historical rebellions and revolutions. The most well-known of these is the Haitian Revolution that began with the invocation Vodou deities in 1791 at Bwa Kayiman.

Racially motivated killings are often processed as a statistic, notwithstanding the well-known killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery, among many others. In the violent taking of George Floyd’s life, witnessed by the world, we have not a statistic but a tragedy. It is both a reminder of the anti-Blackness embedded in our society and an example of the systemic institutional brutality directed towards minoritized communities.

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Newsletter 2016-2017- Persian Language and Literature