Events › American Border Religion with Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Everyone has a border story, but for American borders there is more going on than meets the eye. At times, the US ferociously enforces its borders, while at other times it circumvents or just ignores them. US borders are present and absent, avowed and deferred, enforced and erased, here and there and nowhere. They are solid and specific but also often hard to identify and to locate. They mean different things to different people in different moments. US borders are sometimes located far from the line that one might draw on a map--as we have seen recently in Evanston--either projected far around the globe or brought deep inside the country. Drawing on Professor Hurd’s new book Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, this lecture will explore the paradoxes of creation, enforcement, suspension, and refusal of our American border religion.

About the Speaker:

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and also holds an appointment in the Program on Middle East and North African Studies. Her research interests include religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, religious diversity and pluralism, the politics of secularism and religious freedom, and US actions in and representations of the Middle East. She is the author of Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2008), and four co-edited volumes on religion and politics, including At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia University Press, 2021). At Northwestern, Hurd co-directs the Global Religion & Politics Research Group. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on religion, law, and politics, American borders, the global Middle East, and the politics of religious diversity. She also manages the open access Teaching Law and Religion Case Study Archive, which offers free legal cases and background materials for teaching on the intersections of law, religion, and politics globally.