Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue black and “coloured” lives, while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-whit…[Read more]

This course is intended to give students a broad introduction to (primarily) British modernist fiction in the context of the new media ecology of the early twentieth century. Other media (radio, film), genres (drama), and national traditions (Irish, American, German, Soviet) make appearances.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across s…[Read more]

Review of E. Anne Clements, Mothers on the Margin? The Significance of Women in Matthew’s Genealogy (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2014)

Review of Theodore W. Jennings, An Ethic of Queer Sex: Principles and Improvisations (Chicago: Explorations Press, 2013)

Review of Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins, Religion, Politics and the Earth: The New Materialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

Review of Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

Review of Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher, Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), in Political Theology 13.2 (2012), 264-266.

Review of John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009)

This article responds to David Newheiser’s contribution, ‘Foucault and the Practice of Patristics’, Rick Elgendy’s ‘Practices of the Self, Reading Across Divides: What Michel Foucault Could Have Said about Gregory of Nyssa’ and Devin Singh’s ‘Disciplining Eusebius: Discursive Power and Representation of the Court Theologian’. It discusses two key…[Read more]

This paper interrogates the liberationist vision of Sandford’s “Luxury Communist Jesus,” the reactionary Jesus of Myles’ “Opiate of Christ” and the imperialist chronologies of Wan’s “Reflections on Empire” in relation to broader questions concerning the ambiguities of scriptural hermeneutics and the complex relationship of Christianity to capitalism.

It is always dangerous to assert an essence of anything so sprawling, diverse and multiple as Christianity, which is an institution, or a tradition, or a body that has always been as much at war with itself as with any of the others against which it constitutes itself. But it is perhaps close enough to something like the truth to suggest that,…[Read more]

Slavoj Žižek’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Christian legacy as the only hope for the future of radical politics has, unsurprisingly, made him popular amongst many Christians and theologians in recent years. This article explores the underlying logic of Žižek’s celebration of the Christian legacy, arguing that his dual celebration of the Chr…[Read more]

Christianity has been ‘returning’ to continental philosophy for some time now. At first it was the question of mystical theology which returned to haunt the continental philosophers’ attempts to articulate the unbridgeable gap between words and things, the individual and the world. More recently it is St Paul who has returned to the centre of th…[Read more]