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Jason Josephson Storm

JJ Josephson-Storm

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm
Professor of Religion,
Chair of Science & Technology Studies

Office: Hollander Hall, Rm 302
Phone: (413) 597-2339
E-mail: [email protected]

Education:
M.T.S., Harvard University
Ph.D., Stanford University

Program Affiliations:
Asian Studies
Comparative Literature
Religion
Science & Technology Studies

On sabbatical: 2023/24 academic year

  • · REL 101: “Introduction to the Study of Religion”
    · REL 102: “The Meaning of Life”
    · REL 103: “The Way of Power: A History of Occult Knowledge and Practices”
    · REL 200: “What is Religion? Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion”
    · REL 219 (STS): “Realizing Utopias”
    · REL 250 (ASST): “Virtue Ethics in East Asia”
    · REL 251 (ASST): “Zen Buddhism: History and Historiography”
    · REL 257: “Gods and Demons in East Asian Religion”
    · REL 259 (HIST): “Japanese Religions and the State”
    · REL 271 (ASST/COMP/WGSS): “Erotic, Grotesque, Sublime: Ghosts & Monsters in East Asia”
    · REL 290T: “Explorations of the Afterlife”
    · REL 297T (ANTH/COMP): “Theorizing Magic”
    · REL 300: “Dialectics and the Archaeology of Knowledge: Adorno, Foucault, and the Philosophy of History"
    · REL 301a: “Word Virus: Cultural Studies after the Linguistic Turn”
    · REL 301 (COMP/STS/SOC/WGSS): “Social Construction”
    · REL 308 (STS/SOC/POSCI): “What is Power?”
    · REL 316 (STS) : “Social Ontology”
    · REL 317 : “Disenchantment, Modernity, and the Death of God”
    · REL 327 (COMP): “Theory After Postmodernism: New Materialisms and Realisms”
    · REL 337 (ASST/COMP): “Zen & Philosophy: The Kyoto School & Its Legacy”
    · REL 350 (SOC/COMP): “Max Weber & Critical Theory / Rationalization & Its Discontents”
    · REL 354 (COMP) "Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosophizing with a Hammer"
    ·     REL 355 (STS/COMP) : “Michel Foucault: Confessions of the Flesh"
    · REL 401: “Senior Seminar: Genealogies of Religion”
    · REL 402: “Senior Seminar: Cognitive Theories of Religion”

Research Areas:

· East Asia: Japanese Religions, History of Science in East Asia, Japanese and Chinese Philosophy, East Asian Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto.
· European Intellectual History (1600-present): History of Science, History of Social Sciences (including Religious Studies), History of Philosophy, History of Religion, Esotericism (spiritualism, occultism, theosophy, magic, etc).
· Theory: Theories of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Continental Philosophy (esp. Nietzsche, Foucault, Benjamin, and Adorno), Science & Technology Studies, Critical Theory, Sociological Theory (esp. Max Weber).

About:

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm received his M.T.S. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University. He has held visiting positions at Princeton University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient in France and Ruhr-Universität and Universität Leipzig in Germany.

Professor Storm sees himself largely as a historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He has three primary research foci: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly.  The common thread to his research is an attempt to decenter received narratives in the study of religion and science. His main targets have been epistemological obstacles, the preconceived universals which serve as the foundations of various discourses. Storm has also been working to articulate new research models in the wake of the collapse of postmodernism as a guiding scholarly paradigm.

Japanese Religions: Storm’s scholarship initially concentrated on Japan in the Edo-Meiji Era (1600-1912), treating it as a central node in a series of semi-overlapping transnational networks. Drawing largely on archival sources written in Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Dutch, he worked on the importation of the Euro-American concepts of “religion,” “science,” and “secularism” into Japan and traced the sweeping changes—intellectual, legal, and cultural—that followed.

This line of research culminated in his award-winning book, The Invention of Religion in Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the first study in any European language to reveal how Japanese officials, under extreme international pressure, came to terms with the Western concept of religion by “discovering” religion in Japan and formulating policies to guarantee its freedom.

A secondary area of research is European Intellectual History (esp. English, French, German) from 1600 to the present with particular attention to the cultural context of the formation of the Human Sciences and the construction of “religion” as an object of humanistic inquiry. 

This research came to fruition in The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017) which challenges the most widely held account of modernity and its rupture from the pre-modern past. Based on archival research in five different countries, this monograph traces the history of notions of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, it shows that the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.

Theory: Storm also has an abiding passion for philosophy and Theory more generally. As an undergraduate, he began as a philosophy major with a focus on philosophy of science before his deep involvement with Asian philosophical traditions, such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, took him to a religion department where they were treated more sympathetically. In graduate school, he was trained in East Asian philosophy and Francophone (post)structuralisms. He then spent several years marinating in the work of Hegel and the Frankfurt School. But he has more recently been working on philosophy of social science and returning to an earlier interest in analytic philosophy. Storm juxtaposes these diverse philosophical lineages with insights drawn from postcolonial, critical race and gender theory. In this research he has been focusing on issues relevant to epistemology, virtue ethics, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science.

This philosophical program has resulted in the monograph, Metamodernism:  The Future of Theory  (University of Chicago Press, 2021), which articulates new research methods for the humanities and social sciences by simultaneously radicalizing and moving past the postmodern turn.

(Along with colleagues, Storm has recently co-launched the journal “Metamodern Theory and Praxis” to promote further scholarship, activism, and art around Metamodernism and related themes. If you are interested in submitting to the journal, please visit the link for more information.)

In the same vein, Storm is also working on a further book-length manuscript on “Power,” which provides a theory of causation for the Human Sciences (building on the Process Social Ontology articulated in Metamodernism) and exploring its implications to formulate a novel theory of power.

He is also completing a short monograph tentatively titled “The Genealogy of Genealogy: Foucault, Nietzsche, History, Philosophy, and Race” that provides a critical genealogy of the term “genealogy” tracing it back through Foucault, Deleuze and Nietzsche and exposing the term’s suppressed history and messy entanglements with “race” and eugenics.

Selected Publications:

Monographs:

(Audiobook Version)

 

 

 

 

Edited Monographs:

  • Theosophy and the Study of Religion, Co-edited with Charles Stang (Aries Book Series, Brill: forthcoming).
    1. Inoue Enryō 井上円了, “Prolegomena to an Argument for the Revival of Buddhism” (佛教活論序論, Bukkyō Katsuron Joron) translation, critical apparatus, and introduction, in Buddhism and Modernity: Sources from Nineteenth-Century Japan, 2021.
    2. Arai Hakuseki 新井白石, excerpt from “Tidings from the West” (西洋記聞, Seiyō Kibun) in A Concise Introduction to World Religions. 3rdedition, Roy C. Amore et al, edt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
    3. Yamada Toshiaki 山田利明, various Japanese entries. Encyclopedia of Taoism. Fabrizio Pregadio edt. London: Routledge, 2007.
    1. “Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan by Clinton Godart” Review. Monumenta Nipponica, 2020 75(2): 381-384.
    2. “Magic in the Modern World, edited by Edward Bever and Randall Styers” Review. Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft,Summer 2018 13(2): 299-302.
    3. “Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji competition for Universality, by Michel Mohr” Review. H-Shukyo, H-Net Reviews, 2015, 1-3.
    4. “Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism, edited by Jacqueline Stone and Mariko Walter.” Review. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 2010, 12(2): 148-50.
    5. “Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System, by Nam-lin Hur.” Review. History of Religions, 2009, 49(2): 206-8.
    6. “Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition, by Judith Snodgrass.” Review. Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 2005, 12: 80-3.