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Project Cycle I ran from 2008 through 2012 and focused on the senses and sensory controversies in material religious practice.

A list of Sensational Religion fellows is available here

The thematic and theoretical concerns of Project Cycle I came to influence a number of Center-sponsored programming, including our Symposia and Religion & Film Series. Six efforts, however, grew directly out of an engagement with the key themes and questions of Project Cycle I:

  1. A robust set of contributions, in forms of digital scholarship, shaped in relation to and made publicly accessible on the MAVCOR website.
  2. The Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group has served Project Cycle I as an institutional forum for the presentation of research-in-progress. With the start of Project Cycle II on the immediate horizon, this Research Group will shift its focus to Material Economies of Religion.
  3. The Making Sense of Religion in the Yale Archive exhibition co-curated by Kati Curts, Olivia Hillmer, and Michelle Morgan (4 October 2011 – 3 February 2012).
  4. An Center-wide conference entitled "Sensational Religion: Sense and Contention in Material Practice" held at Yale University in November 2011, which featured some forty speakers drawn from academia and beyond.
  5. A New Scholarship Roundtable held during this first Center conference, which featured a group of twenty graduate student and junior faculty participants from the USA and abroad and aimed to bring new ideas and fresh energy to the conversations and thinkers that define our field of inquiry.
  6. Sensational Religion: Sense and Contention in Material Practice, an edited volume published by Yale University Press in June 2014 featuring more than 35 MAVCOR fellows and initiatives on a vast array of topics that survey religion's material, visual, and sensorial terrains.