Media Reviews
Vol. 12 No. 1 (2026): Death, Loss and Mourning in Film and Media
Anna-Katharina Höpflinger works as a lecturer and researcher in the Study of Religion at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich. Her research interests are body and religion, gender, clothing, death and burial culture, and heavy metal music.
Philippe Bornet is senior lecturer at the University of Lausanne, in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. He completed a doctorate in the comparative history of religions with a study of rituals of hospitality in Jewish and Indian religious texts. After stays in Tübingen and at the University of Chicago, he is currently addressing interactions between India and Europe and the history of Orientalism in late modernity. He has worked on Swiss missionaries in South India in the early twentieth century and on various topics involving the circulation of epistemic, material and visual cultures in this period. He served as treasurer of the International Association for the History of Religions from 2015 to 2020. Recent publications include, as editor, Translocal Lives and Religion (2021), as coauthor with C. Blaser, M. Burger and P. Schreiner, Interweaving Histories: Itineraries between Switzerland and India (1900–1950) (2023) and as coeditor with N. Cattoni, Significant Others, Significant Encounters (2023).
Sofia Sjö is the Research Manager at the Donner Institute for Research into Religion and Culture and holds the title of Associate Professor in the Study of Religions at Åbo Akademi University. She received her doctorate in Comparative Religion from Åbo Akademi University in 2007. Her research interests include: religion and film, religion and media, digital religion, religion and gender, religion and youth.
Teemu Taira is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Helsinki. His work focuses on public discourses on religion; methodology; religion, nonreligion and atheism in media culture. He is the author of Taking “Religion” Seriously: Essays on the Discursive Study of Religion (Brill, 2022), editor of Atheism in Five Minutes (Equinox, 2022), and coauthor of Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred (Ashgate, 2013, now Routledge). He has published and taught extensively about religion and atheism in films, popular culture, popular music, news, and digital media. https://teemutaira.wordpress.com/
Review of the short film IF I DIE IN AMERICA (Ward Kamel, US 2024) that reflects on religion, death, homosexuality, grief, origins, and different world views.