Spring 2018 Faculty News
Aun Hasan Ali took part in an international conference organized by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ from Dec. 7-9, 2017 where he presented a paper titled "The ijazah of al-Allamah al-Hilli to the Bani Zuhrah: Sources for the History of the School of Hillah." Dr. Ali also participated in The Shi’ah Institute’s 2017 symposium held at the University of London in December. He presented a paper titled “Reading the Nahj al-Balaghah in Hillah."
Loriliai Biernacki will be giving the prestigious Rohrbach Lecture for St. John’s College, New Mexico on April 6, 2018. Her talk is titled, "Ahantā, Medieval India's Anti-Cartesian Solution to the Mind-Body problem” and she also recently published a chapter on New Materialisms, titled “Material Subjects, Immaterial Bodies: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheist Matter” in Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science and the New Materialisms. Mary-Jane Rubenstein and Catherine Keller, Eds., Fordham University Press, 2017.
Sam Boyd had two articles accepted recently, one titled “Two Instances of Language Contact in Isaiah 45:14” for the Journal of Semitic Studies, and the other titled “Deuteronomy’s Prodigal Son: Deuteronomy 21:18-21 and the Agenda of the D Source” in the journal Biblical Interpretation. He presented a paper for a conference in the fall on symbolic geography in ancient Babylon and the book of Ezekiel, which will be published in the proceedings for the conference. Additionally, he presented two papers for the national Society of Biblical Literature conference. Sam hopes to finish a draft of his first book (now titled The Borrowed Bible) over research leave in the spring. He also hopes to make good headway on his second book, in which he argues that the story of the Tower of Babel is not about language and in which he challenges the political use of that story in modern society. In the fall of 2017, he won a fellowship through the Research and Innovation Office, as well as a fellowship through the Center for Humanities and the Arts at CU.
Brian Catlos’s new book, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain will be out on 1 May with Basic Books (New York), a UK/Commonwealth edition will be published in June by Hurst & Co (London), followed by translations into German (Beck Verlag: Frankfurt) and simplified Chinese (Gingko: Beijing). Additionally, Dr. Catlos’s book Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050-1614 has been awarded the 2018 Charles Homer Haskins Medal for a distinguished book in medieval studies by the Medieval Academy of America.
This fall, Elias Sacks delivered the annual Lenni Sassower Lecture at the Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, addressing the topic “Can Jews Be Citizens? Jewish Politics from the Enlightenment to Today.” Sacks also published an article entitled "Worlds to Come Between East and West: Immortality and the Rise of Modern Jewish Thought,” exploring the role of debates about immortality in the emergence of Jewish modernity in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as an essay on the Oxford University Press blog entitled “Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew Politics.” He has forthcoming articles in volumes on the future of Jewish philosophy and gender, Judaism, and the Enlightenment, and will soon be completing his term as the President of the Rocky Mountain - Great Plains region of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature.
David Shneer is teaching Post Holocaust American Judaism, a seminar using the PHAJ archives as a backdrop to learning how American Judaism evolved in the wake of the genocide of European Jewry. He will also be giving two keynote address, one at Indiana University on Jewish storytelling; the other in New Zealand at the University of Otago on his book, now under contract with Oxford University Press, called Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph. Finally, he will be hosting the inaugural Archive Transformed, a five-day artist-scholar collaborative residency that will result in a project that engages with community archives to produce new knowledge.