Recent scholarship advocating for global religious history emphasizes the need for religious studies to move beyond eurocentrism, to deconstruct ideologically charged and historically evolving concepts, and to acknowledge the diverse (non-western) players and exchanges involved in the co-production of knowledge on religions. This workshop seeks to contribute to this broader conversation about the necessity of epistemic
decentring within the discipline, focusing on the role of women researchers in shaping religious studies.
As feminist studies have demonstrated, in a male-dominated society, women face the challenge to develop multiple strategies to travel, publish, and carve out new spaces for themselves. In academia, this often means
sacrificing a traditional academic career and instead creating alternative profiles. Consequently, the knowledge of religions produced by women researchers cannot be attributed solely to scholars, but also to writers,
artists, practitioners, and individuals whose contributions have been overlooked so far. This workshop specifically highlights personal archive collections as a vital space where overlooked encounters, silenced voices, and inventive strategies can be brought to light. To facilitate comparison, we will focus on the entangled history of Europe and Asia, which we view as a particularly rich area in the herstory of religious studies. Such an endeavour, however, requires theoretical awareness, methodological caution, specific practical skills, and an interdisciplinary dialogue, which we aim to foster openly and directly by sharing our experiences with archival materials from women researchers and by stimulating exchanges on our individual research agendas and practices.
