This essay offers an autobiographical account of reading across literatures and languages. I compare the selves that I have developed in each of three languages—Russian, Persian, and Georgian—over the course of many years of reading. Refusing to make literary traditions coterminous with national identities, I reflect here on love through lan…[Read more]

This short essay considers rabbinic ideas of reproduction, likeness, and species variation in conversation with the work of Joann Sfar and Sunaura Taylor. Part of Ancient Jew Review’s Forum on Animals.

This research will attempt to evaluate how the thinking of Floridi, especially his emphasis on information, could in some way affect the way we approach art practice. It rests upon an existing body of study about art practice, pursued through a selective literature review of the works of Floridi. As artists rediscover the notion of participation,…[Read more]

Neis traces an expression of bodily language (kavvanat halev, literally “directing the heart”) from biblical to early rabbinic sources and demonstrates how it oriented people to the affective, physical, and spatial dimensions of prayer. Rejecting a binary that would treat such language as either mental/subjective (and thus metaphorically) or sol…[Read more]

Behind the literary form of testament and expressions memorializing the dead is a concept of how objects, rights, and speech pass from one generation to the next: transmission. This essay examines two interrelated phenomena that give filial succession in the biblical and Ugaritic literature its contours: first, the discourses surrounding…[Read more]

This thought experiment considers whether Siamese (Conjoined) are allowed to marry according to Halacha. It considers various aspects of the Biblical bans on incest and offers a very contemporary discussion about the meaning of personhood. This paper uses medical journals, works on medical history, and various responsa to find a precedent and…[Read more]

If art, education, and research always – up to some extent – put us in contact with things yet to be known, yet to be thought, what to say about this anticipation of something taking place, especially if this something ought to take place through our work? In this talk, I approach this question through a series of vignettes – ethics, polit…[Read more]

A comic about the Notre-Dame cathedral 15 April 2019 fire, made by Ernesto Priego reusing images from various sources. References and Original Image Sources listed at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7999418

A comic by Ernesto Priego about Sylvia Plath’s last London address.

In the last decade, there has been an international resurgence of interest in the philosophy of Louis Althusser. New essays, journalism, collections, secondary literature, and even manuscripts by Althusser himself are emerging, speaking in fresh ways to audiences of theorists and activists. Althusser is especially important in educational thought,…[Read more]

Preview of Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (SBL Press, 2019) https://secure.aidcvt.com/sbl/ProdDetails.asp?ID=064211C&PG=1&Type=BL&PCS=SBL

From SBL Press:
In her book, Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature, Meredith J. C. Warren identifies and defines a new genre in ancient texts that she terms…[Read more]

Gino Bonichi, better known as Scipione after the Roman general Scipio Africanus, was born in Macerata in 1904. He moved to Rome in 1909, where
he studied for a short period at the Academy of Fine Arts. Together with Mario Mafai and Antonietta Raphaël he was one of the founders of the so-called ‘Roman School’ or ‘Via Cavour School’, a group of…[Read more]

Jorgenrique Adoum (translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez), ʿĀ’ishah al-Bāʿūnīyah (translated by Th. Emil Homerin), Rachel Tzvia Back, Dan Bellm, Luis Enrique Belmonte (translated by Guillermo Parra), Daniel Borzutzky, George Economou, Sa rah Tuss Efrik (translated by Johannes Göransson), Paul Éluard (translated by Carlos L…[Read more]

María Montes, musicologist expert in Medieval Music, interviewed me on April 6th, 2019 on my experience designing and teaching a course on Medieval Iberian Literature and History using the HBO Show “Game of Thrones” as a thematic axis.

The early Church regarded dreams as potential messages from God, private revelations that appear as visions while the soul is undistracted by bodily sensations. Sleep, with its accompanying dreams, was also believed to be the temporary state of the disembodied soul as it awaits the resurrection of its body at the Last Judgment. Not only did…[Read more]

Early medieval literate culture, dominated by Christian monks and clerics, was focused on interpreting biblical texts and correlating them with a theological system devised in patristic times and late antiquity. Central to biblical exegesis was the fourfold method that distinguished the literal (or historical) sense of Old Testament narratives…[Read more]

[Abstract. This paper begins by examining some of the claims of Dual-Process Theory (also known as Dual-System Theory), in particular its opposition of rapid, intuitive, automatic thought processes to those that are relatively slow, analytic, and consciously controlled. The former traits we share with our primate cousins and with other mammals,…[Read more]

As a verbal artifact, a poem draws upon a number of nonverbal structures in the brain. Even before the emergence of language, certain behaviors had to have been in place, e.g. an increased ca- pacity to bind perceptual data and process them as single events (episodes) and the ability to reproduce perceived actions (mime- sis). These two…[Read more]

Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim (early Palestinian Jewish sages) of the Mishnah and Tosefta (redacted ca. early 3rd century CE) set the human side by side with other species, and embedded their account within broader considerations of reproduction, zoology and species crossings. The human here…[Read more]

Article exploring the use of sibling language in associations beyond Judean or Christian groups.