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Aegis 2021
An interview with Dr. Alexander Rocklin, author of The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad. Aegis - We have with us today, Dr. Rocklin. Dr. Rocklin is an assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Otterbein University. He received his PhD in the history of religions from the University of Chicago and in 2019, he released his first book, The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad. Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed for the 2021 edition of Aegis. Let’s just jump right into the questions. Aegis - Can you give us some background into your interests that led to studying religion during your undergraduate and graduate years? Alex - Sure. Starting out I was very interested in literature. In high school, I was an English nerd and did well in history. In studying literature, I saw that having a particular knowledge in the Bible would be useful. So, I was reading Dante and Flannery O’ Connor and James Joyce. I started taking classes at Harvard, I grew up in Massachusetts. And in [studying] things like the Hebrew Bible, I gradually got more interested in that stuff and was less interested in literature. And that’s how I ended up then majoring in Religious studies, I went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut and they have a fantastic religious
studies program there. I got to take classes with Elizabeth McAlister, she’s an anthropologist who studies Vodou in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora in the US and I got interested in religions in the Caribbean and took the introduction to religion with her. By my senior year of college, I thought [religion] was something I could [study] for the rest of my life. I went to the University of Chicago and their history of religions programs is supposed to be one of the best in the world and that’s how I ended up where I am today. Aegis - In your New Books network interview, you say that you studied Hinduism and Buddhism abroad in Nepal during your undergrad, and then spent a year in Mexico before graduate school. In what ways do you think that such cultural immersion deepened or changed your understanding of religion? Alex - When I was in undergrad, I really wanted to go somewhere very different from what I knew. And I was interested in Buddhism but didn’t know anything about it really. So, I wanted to take a class in Buddhism with Jan Willis, who used to be there, and her class was filled, and I couldn’t get into the class. Nepal was supposedly one of the places people say that Buddha was born, so I was like I’ll go
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