About the Working Group:

In an era marked by deepening polarization and institutional distrust, how do communities establish, maintain, and contest spaces of meaning and shared identity? Join us for an interdisciplinary exploration of sacred spaces as cultural phenomena that touch on fundamental questions of meaning, community formation, and sensory experience.

Our Approach:

This Working Group examines how communities have generated and periodically revived Medieval and Renaissance forms in their creation of sacred spaces. Through multidisciplinary and multi-sensory methods, we will use spaces on campus to recreate how early modern and modern practitioners have employed visual and sonic forms in their pursuit of sacralizing space.

Our study of sacred spaces will shed light on processes of trust-building and trust-erosion when communities fragment or worldviews collide, exploring how these spaces function as both sites of conflict and potential venues for convergence.

The occasion for this Working Group is an international conference on November 19-20, 2025, coinciding with the anniversary of Trinity College Chapel, one of the last significant examples of historicist Gothic revival architecture. Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and completed in 1955, the chapel represents an important continuation of Gothic, Renaissance, and Reformation concepts of sacred space construction and activation through music and ritual.

Topics of Interest:

• Acoustics in early modern churches and broader architectural questions
• How people, stories, and ritual shape the sacredness of space
• The intersection of built sacred space with the intrinsic sacredness of the natural world
• Musical considerations: harmonic rhythm, tessitura, and the singing of texts in sacred spaces
• Cultural associations of music and the “marriage” between sound and space
• Early modern ephemeral festival architecture and musical performance
• How rulers like the Medici appropriated “sacred space” for political agendas

Cross-Cultural Perspectives and Disciplinary Range:

We will examine how sonic and structural forms from the Medieval and Renaissance periods engaged with contemporary cross-cultural influences—Indigenous, Islamic, and Buddhist—and generated languages that resonated into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The conference will open with a guided tour of Indigenous sacred spaces on the University of Toronto St George campus.

This formal collaboration brings together expertise from multiple University of Toronto units, including Art History, History, the School of the Environment, the Faculty of Information, and the Trinity College Faculty of Divinity. We welcome graduate students and faculty interested in exploring topics ranging across Christianity, Islam, Zen Buddhism, and Indigenous spirituality.

Meeting Schedule:

Monthly lunchtime meetings will run from September through April, with sessions in September and October leading up to the November conference, and December through April exploring further implications of our findings.

The first 3 meetings will be on the following dates:

Thursday 2 October, 12noon to 1pm
(Northrop Frye Building Room 205)

Thursday 6 November, 12noon to 1pm (Goldring Student Centre Room 206, 150 Charles Street West)

Thursday 4 December, 12noon to 1pm

Interested in Joining?

We are actively recruiting new members from all disciplines!

Please contact Geoffrey Ready at geoffrey.ready@utoronto.ca to express your interest or learn more about upcoming meeting dates.