In addition to being elected as Treasurer, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Multifaith Scholars Program Amy Allocco also presented research and chaired meetings at the 23rd Quinquennial World Congress in Kraków, Poland.
Amy Allocco was elected treasurer and executive committee member of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) during the 23rd IAHR World Congress in Kraków, Poland from August 24-30, 2025.
A consortium of learned societies for the study of religion around the world, the IAHR was founded in 1950 and has grown to include more than 50 national, regional, and affiliated associations. Allocco will serve in this leadership role for five years, until the next World Congress in 2030, effectuating IAHR fiscal policy, collecting fees and dues, paying the organization’s bills and engaging in fundraising efforts. She succeeds Andrea Rota (University of Oslo, Norway) as treasurer of the organization.
During the week-long Congress, Allocco also presented the first report on her research conducted in 2023-2025 in South India. Titled “Making a Body for Periyandavar in Rural Tamil Spaces,” the paper described the little-known worship of a Hindu lineage deity (kuladevam) called Periyandavar. To stage these Periyandavar’s elaborate rituals, patrilineal relatives hire drummer-priests to fashion a massive anthropomorphic image of the deity from the soil of the family’s native village. Allocco drew on theory on spatial practices, material religion and the body/embodiment to analyze local understandings of the kuladevam’s temporary earthen body, which is only one among Periyandavar’s multiple embodiments. Allocco’s paper explicated indigenous theories of co-substantiality, permeability, and agency and extrapolated from two multi-day ceremonies that she documented in 2024 while conducting field research in Tamil-speaking South India with support from a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship.
Allocco was also invited to moderate a roundtable discussion organized to launch the recently published book titled “Religion and Gender Equality around the Baltic Sea. Ideologies, Policies and Private Lives,” which was edited by Milda Alisauskiene, Egle Aleknaite-Skarubske and Marianne Bjeland Kartzow (Routledge, 2025). The volume aims to rethink the intersections of gender and religion as well as the secular and religious in implementing and challenging gender equality at individual, institutional, and societal levels in the regions around the Baltic Sea. Its chapters utilize approaches from multiple disciplines and present data drawn from fieldwork in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Norway. As moderator, Allocco offered an overview of the co-edited volume and posed a series of questions to the four women scholars who participated, two of whom contributed to the book and two of whom offered comparative perspectives from Poland and Sweden.
At the World Congress, Allocco concluded her five-year term as co-coordinator of the IAHR’s Women Scholars Network (WSN). The group was formed to facilitate scholarly exchange among women scholars and under Allocco’s leadership she and her co-coordinator, Milda Alisauskiene (Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania), introduced a successful webinar series. While in Kraków, Allocco and Alisauskiene convened the WSN meeting, which drew more than 100 attendees, and hosted a reception for participants. They also arranged for a team of librarians from the University of Tübingen to present on their partnership with the WSN aimed at increasing the visibility of women scholars’ research in the study of religion and announced the new WSN Co-Coordinators, Jessica Albrecht (Center of Advanced Studies, Erlangen, Germany) and Carolina Greising Diaz (Catholic University of Uruguay).
Finally, during the World Congress, Allocco met with the editor from Blooomsbury Academic who oversees the “Advances in Religious Studies” book series that Allocco is an editor of, along with Steven Sutliffe (The University of Edinburgh) and Bettina Schmidt (University of Wales). In addition to meeting with the editors, Allocco also engaged with potential authors who are interested in submitting proposals to the series.
Approximately 1,300 scholars of religion convened in Krakow for the IAHR World Congress, whose theme was “Out of Europe: Studying Religion(s) in Interconnected Worlds.” The conference’s local hosts were the Jagiellonian University and the Polish Society for the Study of Religions.