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Dr. Maurice E'bileeni, on his research:

My first book Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense, which is based on my doctoral dissertation, presents a Lacanian psychoanalytical reading of Joseph Conrad’s and William Faulkner’s major novels. My current research focuses on the political and cultural repercussions of Palestinian displacement through Anglophone, Nordic, Latinate, and Hebrew-language textual productions (i.e., prose, poetry, memoirs, and journalism) by Palestinian and Palestinian-descended writers around the globe. I am interested in exploring the significance of cultural proliferation among today’s various Palestinian communities across languages, borders, and generations. My work has been published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Comparative Literature, in the Hebrew-language periodical Ot, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. This project significantly develops the arguments of my second book Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World which is forthcoming with Syracuse University Press.


Dr. Julie Chajes, on her research:

My current research project, which is still in its early stages, explores notions of gender, race, and spirituality in works of fiction associated with the Theosophical Society, an esoteric movement founded in 1875 that has had a wide-ranging cultural impact until the present day. Although Theosophy has, by now, received much scholarly attention, Theosophical fiction has not, and this despite the fact that fiction was one of the principal ways in which esoteric ideas were spread at the fin de siècle. My project focuses on novels dealing with Theosophical themes written by both supporters and detractors of Theosophy. I am particularly interested in literary depictions of a figure that is almost ubiquitous in such novels: the mahatma, or Oriental spiritual master. In some cases, the mahatmas are presented as guides for evolving humanity, whereas in others, they appear as evil beings bent on leading spiritual seekers astray. The project explores the cultural politics of such depictions, to include what they can tell us about how notions of masculinity and race were reinterpreted in light of the emergent category of “spirituality.”


Dr. Ayelet Langer, on her research:

My current project explores the implications of my discovery of a highly defined time structure in Milton’s poetry on Milton’s representation of a series of metaphysical questions: what is the eternal? How do we experience change? What are the conditions that allow us to persist over time and be rooted in place? And how is Milton’s representation of these questions significant to his views on personal identity, self-consciousness, and free will? My project explores Milton’s representation of these questions within the philosophical debates of the seventeenth-century on time, space, and identity, and traces its classical and biblical sources. I am currently working on a related project with my colleague Dr. Sam Lebens of the department of philosophy on the preconditions for receptivity in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. We are looking at the conditions that make a person able to share a moment with another, especially if that other, like God, transcends time.