At the end of the 2024 AAR/SBL meeting, Leela Prasad, a Brown University religious studies professor and the newly named American Academy of Religion president, announced the theme for 2025’s Boston gathering: “perhaps the most desired and, at the same time, the most contentious condition in history: freedom.” She also raised a score of piercing questions about who decides who or what is free and for how long.

A year ago you said, “Assaults on freedom and human rights are rampant, ruthless, and recurring.” How to you see the landscape of freedom today?

It’s worse. Who could have imagined what’s going on at all levels of society—locally, regionally, nationally, globally? When I thought of freedom as a theme for the year, I never expected that it would matter this pressingly. We are in an atmosphere of denialism with an administration that doesn’t want stories of the past or today to be told. At conferences like the AAR, we are going to tell the stories.

How does this meeting matter when scholars are losing their jobs because they are branded DEI hires or their subjects or personal views are unpopular with President Donald Trump?

This conference is the pulse of the AAR. Everybody wants to present their research and discuss it with their peers and maybe get a job or maybe get a book contract. I see two parts to why this is so valuable now. First, we are a diverse group in every form of the word. To show up, speak up, and present your work is an act of resistance. And the second part is to show physical solidarity: we are standing shoulder to shoulder. We’re holding a plenary session on academic freedom and the sovereignty of hope. I’m giving a talk on being vigilant in a time of endangerment. And I also called a special session with as many past presidents of AAR as can attend to talk about steps, strategies, and solidarity around the issue of department closures, truncations, and cuts.

This is a crisis. The constraints on leading a scholarly life are greater than ever before, except maybe in the McCarthy era.

One of your goals is to increase public scholarship. Why so?

Religious studies scholars should be relevant inside and outside of the academy, engaging religion in the public sphere: in schools, colleges, forums of all kinds, from neighborhoods, malls, to wherever religion is being evoked and represented. Scholarship can enhance the conversations.

How do you define religion?

I talk about religion not simply in terms of rituals, beliefs, gods, goddesses, or atheism, but in terms of where people are—their ethics, their values, their prayers. Let the people decide the modes of meaning-making in their lives. The narrower that you construct religion, the more you are going to miss. Open the doors.

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