Wednesday, February 6 | Oakes Mural Room | 5:00 PM
Bruce Lincoln is the Caroline E. Haskell Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His interests center on the social and political dimensions of myth, ritual, and religion, along with the mythic and ritual dimensions of society and politics. He is particularly interested in issues of discourse, practice, power, conflict, and the construction of social borders. He works in Indo-European religions and the anthropology of religion, with occasional excurses into African, Melanesian, and native American traditions. His recent publications include; Authority: Construction and Corrosion (1994); Death, War, and Sacrifice (1991); and Discourse and the Construction in Society (1989). His most recent book, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (1999), addresses narratives that hover between myth and history in the emergence, consolidation, and contestaion of kingship and the nationstate in medieval Scandinavia.