Draft version of syllabus for graduate seminar on Nirvana Sutra

‘Dharma’ (Rightousness)1 sometimes takes the shape of ‘Adharma’ (unrighteousness ).”2 The Mahābhārata gives a subtle message through the stories. Sage Viśhwamitra justifies stealing of a piece of dog’s flesh to save his life during famine. (Śāntiparvan). Blind adherence of the sage Kauśika to his vow of speaking truth led to the killing of the vi…[Read more]

This article is a detailed review of Constructions of Space III: Biblical Spatiality and the Sacred, ed. Jorunn Økland, J. Cornelis de Vos, and Karen J. Wenell (Bloomsbury, 2016); and The King and the Land: A Geography of Royal Power in the Biblical World, by Stephen C. Russell (Oxford University Press, 2017).

The paper argues that the pesaḥ is a ritual with no origins in the literature we have, from the earliest recoverable fragment, through the first revision that introduces as many problems as it aims to solve, to subsequent extensions in multiple directions, with no arc, no trajectory, no telos, but recurrent hermeneutic expressive engagement.

This book is one of the few in a great corpus of literature on meditation, that makes understanding meditation effortless. Not posing as a one-cure-for-all instant solution, this book attunes and trains a person’s mind, and makes one ready to get immersed in meditation, which according to Kamlesh D Patel and Joshua Pollock can be done only t…[Read more]

Psychoanalysis and its father in the West, Sigmund Freud, have often been seen as the antitheses of religion and faith. This book seeks to dispel this misconception and place Freud and psychoanalysis as hopes to the faithful and the hedonist alike. Ethics and morality do not get compromised and unethical and immoral behaviour do not get free…[Read more]

An examination of Mourning and Tears in the works of John Chrysostom, with comparison to his classical and hellenistic predecessors (Aristotle, Seneca, Plutarch).

An article on the Armenian manuscripts at the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana).

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.

An overview of the “state of the field” of critical posthumanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary critical posthumanism studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to “Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio…[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]

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 considers Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of hospitality in relation to the “isolated and heroic being that the state produces by its virile virtues,” through an analysis of female Chechen suicide terrorists in contemporary Russia and the figure of Grendel in the Old English poem “Beowulf,” in order to raise some questions about the relat…[Read more]

In a talk he gave in 1995 at a conference at Georgetown University, “Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts,” Paul Strohm asserted that “postmodernism is preoccupied with history, endlessly obsessed with history, and with the nature of the claims the past exerts upon us; it might almost be called a way of thinking…[Read more]

This essay argues that literary narratives can serve as ideal sites through which to explore the emergence of time’s dissonant conjunctions and surprising forks, arising as they do from minds that are both transhistorical and rooted in particular times and places, and because literary texts are also objects that, as Jonathan Gil Harris has a…[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]