While male illustrators including Alberto Vargas (1896–1982), George Petty (1894–1975), and Gil Elvgren (1914–1980) are synonymous with the field of early-twentieth-century pin-up art, there were in fact several women who also succeeded in the genre. Pearl Frush (1907–1986), Zoë Mozert (1907–1993), and Joyce Ballantyne (1918–2006) each establi…[Read more]

Starting from the critique of Enlightenment from Horkheimer/Adorno to Foucault, this essay discusses implications of such critique for the most eminent figure of Serb enlightenment, Dimitrije (Dositej) Obradović. Topics: Politics towards Josef II’ enlightened despotism, the misunderstanding about Obradovic’ championship of a popular literary…[Read more]

This chapter explores the prose traditions in the Writings under the broad division between historiography and storytelling. While 1–2 Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah make use of archival sources and possibly genuine first-person accounts, these materials are arranged and subsumed under an ideological umbrella—much like contemporaneous Greek his…[Read more]

Book chapter exploring the queering of identity in Bioshock, including analysis of masks and carnivalesque culture in the game. The chapter argues that Bioshock presents an opportunity to queer identity and cultural systems, but forecloses on that possibility and instead reinscribes violence. Finally, the chapter uses its close analysis of the…[Read more]

Video game culture has a long, ongoing history of problems with representation and inclusivity, as a wide variety of forces have constructed video games and gaming as masculine. Against this
background, the popular gamer-oriented web series The Guild (2007–2013) appears to offer a unique counterperspective, presenting a gender-diverse cast and f…[Read more]

Through a detailed analysis of the story “The Three Sisters” from Mia Couto’s collection O Fio das Missangas (“The Bead Necklace”) published in 2004, I reveal how Couto recreates a space where relational practices are at the forefront of existence. I analyse this specific story to reveal Couto’s relational practices and its accompanyin…[Read more]

. I demonstrate how The Book of Chameleons is replete with metaphors of what I call the “non-self,” or “supra-self,” or even “God,” which are commonly found in Zen Buddhist thought, classical African epistemological and ontological paradigms, and more specifically, the idea of African Personality as put forward by Léopold S. Senghor or even in s…[Read more]

As a continuation of my previous transcultural comparative project, the current study aims to unearth some other similarities that exist between African classical knowledge systems, as put forward in the writing of Mia Couto and the work of other Africanists such as Wole Soyinka, Jacob Olupona and Léopold Senghor— in respect to their links to po…[Read more]

The Nakba not only resulted in the loss of the homeland, but also caused the dispersal and ruin of entire Palestinian communities. Even though the term Nakba refers to a singular historic event, the consequence of 1948 has symptomatically become part of Palestinian identity, and the element that demarcates who the Palestinian is. Palestinian exile…[Read more]

Conference handout for CAMWS 2013 paper

Conference handout from NAPS 2012 paper

Quarter Horses are considered one of the earliest and most enduringly popular breeds of horse that is “native” to the United States.

The American Quarter Horse Association formed as a breed registry in 1940, and set clear rules for what horses could be called Quarter Horses in its stud book. Recently, after several years of legal bac…[Read more]

CFP for a special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research

Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/ early fifth centuries, this paper tracks the intertwined lives of divine image-things and rabbis living in late Roman and Byzantine period Palestine. The paper argues that the religious image-things of others (or avodah zarah, in rabbinic terms) pressed in different ways on…[Read more]

Part of a panel discussion in the Use and Influence of the New Testament seminar

Hand-drawn illustration of a ‘Iudaea Capta’ coin, after LIMC ‘IUDAEA’ 14 (and BMCRE 117)

Hand-drawn illustration of a ‘Iudaea Capta’ coin, after LIMC ‘IUDAEA’ 14 (and BMCRE 117)

This work addresses the question of how the patron saint festivities in San Germán, Puerto Rico assisted in the reconstruction of the Puerto Rican nation during the 1950s. Particularly, I focus on how community leaders reproduced ideas of nationhood based on hispano-centric, white, Catholic, and patriarchal parameters. I investigate how an…[Read more]

The Gospel of John is not unique in representing Jesus as performing miracles, but the way that John uses signs to point to Jesus’s Christological identity stands out among the canonical gospels. In John, when Jesus is called χριστός—Christ, messiah—it is often in the context of a sign being performed. However, the relationship between Jesus…[Read more]

This essay offers an introduction to select disciplinary developments in the study of history and in historical study of the Hebrew Bible. It focuses first and foremost on “cultural history,” a broad category defined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in anthropology and sociology, literary theory and linguistics, and other fie…[Read more]