Sonja Luehrmann Memorial Lecture Series

Our highly esteemed and beloved colleague and friend, Sonja Luehrmann, passed away on August 24, 2019, a little over two years after she was diagnosed with cancer. In consultation with her family, our department created the .

Throughout her exceptional research and teaching career, Dr. Luehrmann inspired her interlocutors both in and beyond the academy to think more compassionately about the changing landscape of religious belief and social commitment. Rigorously combining methods from both anthropology and history, Dr. Luehrmann鈥檚 research focused on religion and secularism in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

The Sonja Luehrmann Memorial Fund supports the Dr. Sonja Luehrmann Memorial Lecture, an annual event that celebrates Sonja鈥檚 passion for intellectual engagement. Please consider donating to this fund today.

Watch and Learn: Dr. Sonja Luehrmann Memorial Lecture

Through the fund's support, the Dr. Sonja Luehrmann Memorial Lecture continues Sonja's work by bringing emerging and established researchers to 大象传媒 to present lectures that engage our community in ideas related to her research.

Previous memorial lectures:

Ordering the City: Gender, Religion, and the Spatial Politics of Control

Dr. Nazanin Shahrokni | September 26, 2024

Right-wing Religious Movements, Power and Politics: Insights from Brazil

| October 20, 2023

EXPLOSIONS OF CULTURE: UKRAINIAN CREATIVITY AND RESILIENCE IN THE FACE OF WAR

| September 21, 2022

History Written in Advance: Christian Prophecy, Chinese-Zambian Relations, and Diffracted Modernity

| March 9, 2022

Fake Churches and False Unification: The Anthropology of Conversion in the Divided Koreas

| March 30, 2021

Since the 1990s, the sums of faith-based aid to North Korea have been so vast as to stir speculations that Protestant Christians are the ones secretly propping up the North Korean regime. The irony is that Evangelicals in South Korea and the Korean diaspora remain the most strident proponents of anticommunism and the South鈥檚 total conquest of the North. What is the relationship between Christianity, communism, and capitalism in the divided Koreas? How do South Korean perceptions of religion in North Korea entwine theologies of mission with ideologies of unification? In this lecture, Angie Heo will explore the contradictions of economic aid and religious freedom in a unique geopolitical zone where the Cold War never ended. Drawing inspiration from Sonja Luehrmann鈥檚 writings on religion, atheism, and communism, she will further specify how Christianity in the divided Koreas presents a challenge to current anthropological scholarship on conversion and sectarianism.

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Sociology & Anthropology