Visiting scholar explores new European religiosities

European scholar Alessandro Testa will give a talk titled “Ritualization and Myth-Making in Contemporary Societies” on Monday, April 14, 2025 at 3 p.m. in the Knight Library’s DREAM Lab. He will present his thoughts on processes of ritualization, myth-making, and the emergence of new forms of religiosities—with a specific focus on his ethnographic research in several European countries. He will explore how cultural heritagization, re-enchantment, and re-traditionalization have influenced the entanglements and intersections between the spheres of religion, rituality, and mythology in late modern Europe. 

Alessandro Testa is currently Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Folklore at UC Berkeley, and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. He is interested in a variety of themes in religious studies and in the historical and cultural anthropology of European societies. He has authored five monographs and numerous peer-reviewed articles and chapters. Testa’s works have been published in 9 different languages. Among his latest books are ‘Re-enchantment’ and Religious Change in Former Socialist Europe (2024), Ritualising Cultural Heritage and Re-Enchanting Rituals in Europe (2023), Politics of Religion: Authority, Creativity, Conflicts (2021), and Rituality and Social (Dis)Order (2020).

Testa’s campus visit, organized by Folklore and Public Culture, is cosponsored by the OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities. For more information contact Daniel Wojcik, Professor of Folklore and Public Culture: dwojcik@uoregon.edu