An examination of the debate over the Theory of Names between Origen and Celsus in Origen’s Contra Celsum and its implications for late antique ritual worship.

A translation and study of seven hymns (madrashe) on vigil of Ephrem the Syrian preserved in Classical Armenian.

A survey of an re-reading of Job 42:6, in a Festshcrift honoring the late Semitic philologist, Giovanni Garbini.

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]

This short essay is part of a Forum centered upon responses to Simon During’s essay, “Precariousness, Literature and the Humanities Today,” Australian Humanities Review 58 (May 2015), and argues (following Nicholas Bourriaud’s figure of the radicant) for the becoming-itinerant of humanistic practice, as well as for reinventing the Academy as a wan…[Read more]

This article discusses the reason behind Jeroboam, king of Israel, instituting a holiday in the eighth month of calendar. We suggest an approach that looks at this holiday as misplaced from the seventh month by means of an additional unauthorized leap-month.

עיונים וביאורים הערות וציונים על מסכת יבמות

The introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory, edited by Eileen Joy and Christine Neufeld, on “Premodern to Modern Humanisms: The BABEL Project.” This essay sketches out a blueprint for pursuing new “critical humanisms” in a post/human age.

This special issue of the “Journal of Narrative Theory” represents one of the BABEL Working Group’s first forays into a collaborative and “baggy” humanistic scholarship between medieval studies, more contemporary humanistic studies, and the sciences, with the objective of interrogating together the open terms, “human,” “humanity,” “humanism,”…[Read more]

This essay serves as the Preface to “Still Thriving: On the Importance of Aranye Fradenburg,” a collection of critical reflections on the career and paradigm-shifting scholarship of medievalist and psychoanalyst L.O. Aranye Fradenburg.

This short essay, co-authored with L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, in the edited 2-volume collection BURN AFTER READING, eds. Eileen A. Joy, Myra Seaman, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Oliphaunt Books, 2014), ruminates the importance of the humanities as an important space for the artfulness of living, for enriched environments, and real-time experimental…[Read more]

The work of L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, especially her psychoanalytic criticism of Chaucer, and her formulations of discontinuist historical approaches to the Middle Ages, has been extremely influential within medieval studies for several decades. More recently she has been focusing on more broad defenses of the humanities, especially with regard to…[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]

Argues that Qohelet’s famous bit of speech on the seasons at 3:1-8 mimics and mocks proverbial poetry, as part of his larger, prosaic denial that life has discernible and usable rhythms and rhymes.

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]

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]