The 2024 Furfey Lecture
Professor Geneviève Zubrzycki: “Religious Nationalism in the 21st Century”
Geneviève Zubrzycki is William H. Sewell Jr. Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. A historical and cultural sociologist, she has published widely on nationalism, religion, and secularism; collective memory, national mythology and the politics of commemoration; and religious visual culture and materiality. She’s the author of the award-winning books The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago 2006), Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec (Chicago 2016), and Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism and Poland’s Jewish Revival (Princeton 2022). In 2021 Zubrzycki was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and was awarded the Bronislaw Malinowski Prize in the Social Sciences from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. Her latest book, Resurrecting the Jew, was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences, and the Rachel Feldhay Brenner Award by Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America for its contribution to Polish-Jewish Studies.
About the Furfey Lectures*
The Furfey Lecture has been given at the ASR Annual Meeting since 1981, continuing an earlier series begun in 1974 at The Catholic University of America. It is named in honor of Paul Hanley Furfey, the seventh president of the Association. As both professor and priest, Dr. Furfey demanded of himself and others not only rigor in sociological method but also a sense of sociology’s role in serving the needs of people. In his book The Scope and Method of Sociology (1953) he introduced the term “metasociology,” or that area of sociology delving into the assumptions and value judgments underlying theories and methods.
The series’ earliest lectures were given by Robert Bellah (1974), Benton Johnson (1975), Gordon Zahn (1976), Talcott Parsons (1977), Robert Drinan (1978), Suzanne Keller (1979), David Moberg (1980), Marie Augusta Neal (1981), and James Beckford (1982).
* Edited from a longer description in the Spring, 1982 issue of Sociological Analysis, the ASR’s journal.