Vaia Touna is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. She is author of Fabrications of the Greek Past: Religion, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Identities (Brill 2017), editor of Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity: Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place (Equinox 2019) and co-editor of Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion (Bloomsbury 2023). Her research interests focus on the sociology of religion; historiography; acts of identification and social formation as they relate to discourses of the past; as well as theoretical and methodological issues concerning the study of “religion” in the ancient Graeco-Roman world.
Identity or Identification? In this second podcast for Identities? Week, the Culture on the Edge group address the issue of religious identity. Is our identity – cultural, religious or other – something which causes us to act, or something which we choose to mobilise in certain circumstances? And what part do scholars have in reifying these discourses?
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