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).

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.
David Thurfjell is professor in the Study of religions at Södertörn university, Stockholm. His research spans across several empirical fields and circles around themes pertaining to religious revivalism, religion as a means of social mobilisation and the discursive authority surrounding religion and secularity. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Iran, he has published on the grass roots activists of Iranian Islamism and on charismatic Shi’ite revivalism, (for instance see Living Shi’ism, Brill 2006). His second empirical field is charismatic Christian revivalism among Romani people. Based on ethnographic research, Thurfjell has here written on the role Pentecostalism plays in establishing an organisational and conceptual platform for social struggle, (Faith and Revivalism in a Nordic Romani Community, Tauris 2011). Moving away from his focus on charismatic religious expressions and minority communities, Thurfjell’s more recent publications have dealt with views on religion among the secular mainstream majority populations in Scandinavia (Godless people (Swedish: Det gudlösa folket, Molin & Sorgenfrei 2015)). The plenary lecture at the EASR-conference in Tartu will present results from his two last projects. It will address the question of what happens when a country of self-proclaimed seculars becomes increasingly multi-religious.