The 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) takes place at the University of Tartu this summer. The conference is organized by the Estonian Society for the Study of Religions in cooperation with the School of Theology and Religious Studies and the Institute of Cultural Research of the University of Tartu.
Sonja Luehrmann is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on the politics of atheism, religion, and interreligious coexistence in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, and more broadly in the Orthodox Christian world. Her publications include Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic (Indiana University Press, 2011), Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2015), and the edited volume Praying with the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Christian Spirituality in Practice (Indiana University Press, 2018). She is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of reproduction and “traditional family values” in the Russian Orthodox Church.

The 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) takes place at the University of Tartu this summer. The conference is organized by the Estonian Society for the Study of Religions in cooperation with the School of Theology and Religious Studies and the Institute of Cultural Research of the University of Tartu.
Lotte Tarkka is Professor of Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her theoretical and methodological interests include oral poetics, theories of genre, intertextuality in oral poetry, processes of traditionalization and authorization, vernacular and mythic imagination, and reconstructive performance studies. She specializes in the study of Finnic oral traditions, especially poetry in the Kalevala-meter, Elias Lönnrot’s epic, the Kalevala, and Viena Karelian culture. She is the author of Songs of the Border People. Genre, reflexivity, and performance in Karelian oral poetry (2013).