Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Emma Polyakov
Home institution
Merrimack College
Country of origin (home institution)
United States
Discipline(s)
Religious sciences
Theme(s)
Identity
Religion
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Emma Polyakov is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Merrimack College, and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lund University. She received a Ph.D. from Boston College, as well as degrees from Boston University and Bard College. Her publications include the monographs The Nun in the Synagogue: Judeocentric Catholicism in Israel and Remembering the Future: The Experience of Time in Jewish and Christian Liturgy, and the edited volumes Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Interreligious Hermeneutics: Ways of Seeing the Religious Other and the forthcoming Jerusalem in Memory and Eschatology: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Visions of the Past and Future of Jerusalem.
Research Project
The Idea of the Holy Land: Interreligious Contestation and the Construction of Sacred Space
Emma Polyakov’s current research explores the Holy Land as an idea. She reads this idea of the Holy Land as a culturally constructed ideological phenomenon, and she is interested in how this landscape of the mind has taken countless forms in the Christian imagination. The manifold ideas of the Holy Land are projections of a multiplicity of religious and cultural narratives, collective memories, and ideals that each contribute to reimagining a sacred landscape and conceptually imprinting it upon the physical place. Polyakov focuses on processes of ideological competition and interreligious contestation in the formation of ideas of the Holy Land. As Christian visions of the Holy Land are enacted and reinforced on the ground, they entangle with Jewish and Muslim constructions of sacred place which weave different histories and meanings around the same locations, and lay claim to the same place. Polyakov’s work investigates how these encounters with the religious and cultural other shape diverse concepts and expressions of sacred space.
Research Interests:
Jewish-Christian relations; religious temporalities; religious ritual and experience; religious identities