This essay examines Giambattista Vico’s philology as a contribution to democratic legitimacy. I outline three steps in Vico’s account of the historical and political development of philological knowledge: first, his merger of philosophy and philology, and the effects of that merger on the relative claims of reason and authority; second, his use…[Read more]

This article focuses on the diplomatic mission of the Ragusean captain Casilari, to free the crew of a Ragusean ship captured by the Moroccan pirates. Through the relations between Ragusa and the empire of Morocco, the paper deals with an episode of the endemic piracy in the Mediterranean, but it also sheds light on the importance of the Ragusean…[Read more]

עיונים וביאורים הערות וציונים על מסכת יבמות

My poetic Preface to Kathleen Biddick’s book, “Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties” (punctum books, 2016), which is indebted to and adapted from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” which sketches out the exploratory soundings of a sea-wreck of forgotten histories that bears uncanny resonances with Kathleen Biddick’s own acediou…[Read more]

“Liquid Beowulf” serves as the Introduction to “The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook” (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006), and makes an argument for the Old English poem as a richly inter- and cross-temporal cultural response to historical traumas that still haunt our present moment and which also poses always important (and…[Read more]

Extending an argument presented in two articles published Studies in Art Education and Visual Arts Research, I discuss what would a poetic historiography mean for art education research.

A response to papers presented as part of “Cy-Curious: Machines in religious imagination”: “Academic Assemblages in a Cyborgean Garden,” Lise Miltner (Brown University); “Bioethics, Human Nature, and the Enhancement Debate,” Joseph Fisher (Columbia University); and “Technoscience in Tolkien: How Fictional Worldviews Facilitate Reflection on the…[Read more]

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]

The editors of the present volume convened an international conference on “Yoga in Transformation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on a Global Phenomenon” at the University of Vienna, which took place on 19–21 September 2013.2 For the sake of coherence and optimisation of synergies, its focus was on the exploration of the phenomenon of yo…[Read more]

Little India is a rich historical and ethnographic examination of a fascinating example of linguistic plurality on the island of Mauritius, where more than two-thirds of the population is of Indian ancestry. Patrick Eisenlohr’s groundbreaking study focuses on the formation of diaspora as mediated through the cultural phenomenon of Indian ancestral…[Read more]

This special issue of Religions of South Asia is born out of this expanding area of study and collaboration between contemporary practitioners and established academic methods of study. Most of articles in this volume were first presented at an international ‘Yoga Darśana, Yoga Sādhana’ conference hosted in Kraków, Poland in May 2016. The Krakow…[Read more]

This special issue of Religions of South Asia is born out of this expanding area of study and collaboration between contemporary practitioners and established academic methods of study. Most of articles in this volume were first presented at an international ‘Yoga Darśana, Yoga Sādhana’ conference hosted in Kraków, Poland in May 2016. The Krakow…[Read more]

How should we read claims about health and well-being which defy common sense? Are claims of extreme longevity to be viewed as fraudulent, or as pushing the boundaries of possibility for the human body? This article will consider the narrative and context around a particularly well-publicized incident of rejuvenation therapy, advertised as…[Read more]

This paper describes a catalogued but rare manuscript (call number 170/307) held by the Charles Young Research Library at UCLA, in which one can find the by-laws of a barely known medieval confraternity, located in the city of Teruel and devoted to St. Julian.
Most of these by-laws were written around 1402, although it does also…[Read more]

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of meditation systems in Asia taught at McMaster University in Fall 2018

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of meditation systems in Asia taught at McMaster University in Fall 2018

Section 295-C of Pakistan’s penal code prohibits insulting the Prophet and carries a mandatory death penalty. This law was passed based on a claim of ijma‘ (consensus among Islamic scholars) that such an offense is subject to a hadd (divinely fixed) punishment. Nearly half of those charged under this statute crimes of hadd are Christians, who mak…[Read more]

In this course, students will analyze texts that Americans have treated as “scripture.” Students will read texts that present themselves as scripture, such as selections from the Book of Mormon and a Holy Sacred and Divine Roll and Book (a Shaker text). They will also read texts that have attained a sort of canonicity within American culture, such…[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]