Lisa Bitel to deliver the Boston University Department of Religion Annual Lecture
The Department of Religion of Boston University is delighted to welcome Professor Lisa Bitel of the University of Southern California to give our annual Religion lecture. Her talk Converting the Religious Supernatural: A Fairy Tale will take place on Monday, February 6 th , 2023, at 6pm.
Professor Lisa Bitel will address the persistence of the Otherworld in ancient literature and modern folklore as well as in graphic and digital media. In Ireland and elsewhere believers continue to encounter the aos síthe (folk of the Otherworld) and similar “small gods” and to exploit them for both tourism and religion. These small gods, by way of Wales, also became French fairies (Fée); while the faeries of post-Norman England eventually became a lucrative modern business in fantasy literature, garden decor, and other popular media. Bitel examines this co-evolution of story and Otherworld over the long haul, asking: Why do some forms of the supernatural and their veneration survive major religious shifts while others disappear?
Professor Lisa Bitel will address the persistence of the Otherworld in ancient literature and modern folklore as well as in graphic and digital media. In Ireland and elsewhere believers continue to encounter the aos síthe (folk of the Otherworld) and similar “small gods” and to exploit them for both tourism and religion. These small gods, by way of Wales, also became French fairies (Fée); while the faeries of post-Norman England eventually became a lucrative modern business in fantasy literature, garden decor, and other popular media. Bitel examines this co-evolution of story and Otherworld over the long haul, asking: Why do some forms of the supernatural and their veneration survive major religious shifts while others disappear?
Professor Bitel (BA, Smith College; Ph.D., Harvard) is the author of Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender From Early Ireland (Cornell, 1996) and Landscape with Two Saints: How Saint Genovefa of Paris and Saint Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe (Oxford, 2009), among many other books on women and the Christianization of Ireland. And most recently she published Our Lady of the Rock: Vision and Faith in the California Desert (Cornell, 2015), about a contemporary woman visionary whose reports of the Virgin’s apparitions have sparked a major American pilgrimage site. Bitel, a Guggenheim Recipient and Fellow of the Medieval Academy, specializes in the interaction of saint traditions, landscape, gender, and visionary experience. She also chaired the Religion Department at USC from 2017 to 2019.
