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While biologists argue about the limits and definition of a species, the urge to cluster and distinguish among the plenitude of lifeforms that populates the planet remains. Contemporary concerns about attempts to clone monkeys and to engineer human-porcine chimeras point to…[Read more]

A reflection on what notions of angels suggest about how late ancient people knew the world and its inhabitants.

In this paper I argue that Philo’s Embassy to Gaius makes use of the literary paradigm
of theatricality, a strategy of representation marked by the portrayal of multiple
and competing discourses amongst those in unequal relations of power, as
well as an emphasis on the arts of acting and discernment. Th e Embassy marks an
appearance of the t…[Read more]

Scholarly reflections on the concept of the will as it is articulated in late ancient texts have centered on the male individual and the difficulties he faces as he tries to train or direct his intentions. By contrast, in this article we seek to explore late ancient concepts and negotiations of the will by considering a cluster of ancient Jewish…[Read more]

The introduction and the methodology chapters of my Ph.D. thesis with the same title.

Quakers enjoy their work. They tend to work in places which share their ambitions to make the world a better place. But how do Quakers respond when things go wrong? What we find is that the work organisation sets out the terms upon which Quakers try to improve the world. Quakers generally accept these terms. But when Quaker and work horizons…[Read more]

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]

This chapter examines the tendency of readers of Thoreau’s 1864 book “The Maine Woods” to read the landscape through which Thoreau travels as pristine wilderness. I argue, by contrast, that Thoreau presented a social landscape, a “working-forest” avant-la-lettre.

This section of 494 provides students with an introduction to the reading, history, and making of comics and graphic novels. Comics have often been associated with popular culture, pulp fiction, and ephemerality. Yet comics merge image and text to create a unique form of sequential art that is becoming ever more visible and influential in our…[Read more]

DTC 356 explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political roles of information and data. Beginning with library classification systems and Wikipedia, the course then turns to the role of metadata in organizing collections and our lives before ending with a consideration of text-mining and topic modeling. The conclusion considers these techniques in…[Read more]

Because it is all too easy to (accidentally) make assumptions about what first-year students know about language, in 2019-2020 my lit and comp type courses will begin with a segment on language, before moving on to sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

Our exploration of language will start by jumping into a story, to help us identify the 8 parts…[Read more]

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

“Where do we find ourselves?” are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” first words. The query is the author’s starting point for a number of philosophical considerations; it’s also the point of departure for our making sense of pain, through the reading of both Emerson’s essay and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The essay hipothesises that Joyce’s “We walk…[Read more]