Erdoğan’ın siyasi hayatında şiirin çok önemli bir yeri var. Aldığı hatip eğitiminin de yardımıyla kürsülerden okuduğu şiirler popülaritesinin çok önemli parçasını oluşturuyor. Üzerine giydiği siyasi gömleği her kriz anında, o krizin sunduğu fırsatlar çerçevesinde değiştirse de, seçtiği şiirler içliğini değiştirmekte…[Read more]

Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer who called himself Question Mark, left a lot of questions behind him. One of them obviously speaks for itself: what motivated him to kill thirty-three strangers at Virginia Tech? Another question almost goes without saying: why do we seek refuge behind moral explanations? Like ‘the question mark kid’ the adult…[Read more]

This is the Syriac section for the Wisdom of Solomon article.

This is the syllabus I’ve designed for my Fall 2019 undergraduate-level Introduction to Film course. I focused the course as a genre study of American horror films. I want my students to be able to consider the socio-political contexts of popular films and to detect and explain the arguments and worldviews produced by film.

Abstract and introduction for PhD dissertation, defended and deposited in April 2019.

This published Japanese-English guidebook to the island of Shikoku, emphasizing its culture and history, has been available by permission on the Web in French, Spanish, and Dutch at European Websites, as well as this English-Japanese version since 1997. Most of the chapters are bilingual, with English and Japanese alternating for those studying…[Read more]

From the 2007 remake of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games to Adam Robitel’s Escape Room (2019), the survival game has become a recurring sub-genre of American horror cinema in the last twenty years; however, its haunting presence has yet to be fully analyzed.

The American survival game horror film is uniquely able to render neoliberal con…[Read more]

Mindfulness of breathing or ānāpānasati has a prominent place among the meditation methods taught by the Buddha. This doesn’t come as a surprise, if we know this is exactly the method the Teacher used to attain his own enlightenment, but also to “generally dwell during rains residence”. Therefore, he qualified this type of mental training as a n…[Read more]

Udāna is the third book of the Khuddaka Nikāya, the last of the five nikāyas in the Sutta Pitaka. It consists of eight vaggas, with ten suttas in each, 80 suttas in total. Similarly to some other books of the Pāli Canon, in this collection each sutta is a combination of prose and verses called udānas, inspired utterances or uplifting utte…[Read more]

A cultural, historical, and practical guidebook to Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku across the narrow Seto Inland Sea from the main island of Japan. Formerly the province of Sanuki, a compact area with convenient train lines, it has great potential for tourism. An active region culturally for more than 2,000 years, it was the birthplace…[Read more]

This essay explores Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura” from a Marxist perspective, including its depiction of the Italian bourgeoisie of “il boom” era of the 1950s and 1960s. Numerous frame enlargements are used to substantiate the claim that even the film’s style contributes to its representations of socioeconomic class.

This article investigates the representation of Italian Americans in classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema, expanding the research originally conducted by noted scholar Mirella Affron.

This article compares and contrasts two films that take place in Japan but that were directed by French and American directors. Their “outsider perspective” is explored in terms of their respective films’ themes, characters, and cinematic styles.

This is a review/analysis of the Antonioni film IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN (1982), occasioned by its DVD release by the Criterion Collection.

This essay uses Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Monomyth to analyze both the mythic and contemporary implications of a “popcorn” movie that has numerous social and political subtexts for the Reaganite era.

This essay compares After Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW and Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP in terms of their similarities in narrative, characters, and cinematic style.

This essay uses the work of Wilhelm Reich to analyze the “mass psychology of fascism” in Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Nazi propaganda film, TRIUMPH OF THE WILL.

This article examines the parallels between the space alien in Spielberg’s “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” and the New Testament account of the life of Jesus Christ.

This book chapter analyzes Steven Spielberg’s supposedly anti-war SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1992) as a pro-war, pro-military, and pro-America movie.