Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site…[Read more]

This essay examines the circumstances of the production and appearance of East Germany’s first film about homosexuality (the short documentary “Die andere Liebe” or “The Other Love”), while considering the role it plays in our understanding of the development of German lesbian and gay history. More specifically, this essay provides a reading of…[Read more]

The concept of the exception has heavily shaped modern political theory. In modernity, Kierkegaard was one of the first philosophers to propound the exception as a facilitator of metaphysical transcendence. Merging Kierkegaard’s metaphysical exception with early modern political theorist Jean Bodin’s theory of sovereignty, Carl Schmitt int…[Read more]

Both in terms of its content and its methodology, Pious Irreverence is a pioneering work. Weiss artfully employs all the tools of textual analysis developed over the last four decades of rabbinic scholarship and brings them to bear on TY, a largely neglected corpus. Tanhuma-Yelammedenu has never been studied as a work of theology, nor from a…[Read more]

This thesis seeks to contribute towards the emerging discourse in Ravel studies concerning gender, as well as adding to the ongoing work in musical narratology, especially as regards ballet, to which very little narratological attention has been given. Employing a combination of narratological and Schenkerian analysis, this thesis argues that…[Read more]

This essay uses Arnaldo Momigliano’s genealogy of antiquarianism and historiography to propose a new method for engaging the past. The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) traced antiquarianism from its advent in ancient Greece and later growth in Rome to its early modern efflorescence, its usurpation by history, and its transformation…[Read more]

This article presents the results of a multidisciplinary project aimed at better understanding the impact of different digitization strategies in computational text analysis. More specifically, it describes an effort to automatically discern the authorship of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in a body of uncorrected correspondence processed by HTR…[Read more]

“This essay argues that German regional crime fiction is both a modern development and simultaneously a recollection of crime fiction’s journalistic and literary beginnings. …[R]egional crime fiction has connections to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Fallgeschichten (case stories) that fascinated a developing reading public and satisfied…[Read more]

The thirteenth century kabbalist Abraham Abulafia held Hebrew to be the divine language, designed by God as an ontological aspect of reality. Through meditating on and deconstructing names into their letters, one could then engage in the process of reunifying reality into the primordial Name of God, the Tetragrammaton. This paper offers an…[Read more]

Assembled cigar box fiddle. Fiddlin’ John Hutchison learned to play on a fiddle made from an Old Virginia Cheroots Tobacco box. In a taped interview he calls it a “cigar box.”

The label is under the soundboard. Fiddlin’ John Hutchison learned to play on a fiddle made from an Old Virginia Cheroots Tobacco box. In a taped interview he calls it a “cigar box.”

Fiddlin’ John Hutchison learned to play on a fiddle made from an Old Virginia Cheroots Tobacco box. In a taped interview he calls it a “cigar box.”

In this article I make a case for an analytic of atmospheres as a way to understand the seemingly ineffable yet powerful effects of vocal sound on listeners in an Islamic setting. Focusing on the recitation of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad among Mauritian Muslims, I seek to bring together neo-phenomenological approaches to…[Read more]

This talk presents work from Richard Elliott’s recent book about the late singer, songwriter, pianist and civil rights activist Nina Simone. It focuses on Simone’s reaction to what she saw as the failure of the civil rights movement and how that reaction was played out in her work from the end of the 1960s onwards, blending into a personal but…[Read more]

Although most often remembered as an icon of the civil rights era, Nina Simone enjoyed (and occasionally endured) a long career during which the bulk of the songs she performed dealt with the politics, pains and precariousness of the self. Her work—always suffused with longing, sensuality and the passion of being—took on, in her later career, wha…[Read more]

Whether temporally or spatially focussed, nostalgia results from a division between what is longed for and the moment of longing. This article examines this “nostalgia gap” alongside the analogous gap found in representation. The relationship is highlighted via an analysis of “holiday records”, a genre of recordings that became prevalent in the…[Read more]

Taylor Swift’s songs invite listeners to connect art and life in the tradition, if not always the style, of the ‘confessional’ singer-songwriter. From an early age, Swift has written and sung about ‘big topics’ like time and experience with a remarkable sense of self awareness. Her songs hymn youthful experience to great effect through reference…[Read more]

The beatification of Saint Teresa of Ávila in October 1614 gave rise to widespread celebrations in many of the cities and towns of the Iberian Peninsula. Printed relaciones describing these celebrations, despite their limitations —in terms of political agenda, propaganda, rivalry and literary style— can nevertheless provide information about musi…[Read more]

Manuscript Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 6298 contains an as yet unexamined fragment of the second batch of the gospel glosses (EvII) from the biblical commentaries of the Canterbury School inserted as an addition in 3r of the manuscript. In this article, I describe this fragment, and I attempt to contextualize its insertion into the…[Read more]