Bryn Mawr Faculty
Death and Burial Within the Ancient Levant (4500-550 Bce): Challenging the Normative
by Jennie Bradbury
Assistant Professor and Department Co-Chair of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology and Director of Graduate Studies
This book offers a comprehensive survey of burial practices in the ancient Levant and challenges some of the assumptions behind previous attempts to find a normative burial practice.
Exploring the dazzling variety of ways in which the living deal with the dead, this book utilises big data projects and legacy data to highlight the sheer diversity of burial practices in the ancient Levant. Theorizing that some types of burial are significantly underrepresented, this volume argues for the necessity of analysing both the existing and non-existing data at multiple scales of analysis. Thus, rather than attempting to identify a 'normative' or 'typical' burial, the volume highlights the multitude of ways in which the living approached and interacted with the dead across the ancient Levant, from the Late Chalcolithic to the Iron Age (fifth to first millennia BCE). In doing so it acknowledges and foregrounds variability, not only in terms of so-called 'atypicality', but also in terms of burials and practices that have been mistakenly lumped together in the drive to produce narratives of similarity and normative behaviour. This volume also explores some of the broader patterns and temporal/spatial shifts that shed light on wider changes in the ways in which humans perceive(d) of the dead and themselves (the living) over time.
While predominantly focused on the modern regions of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, this book also engages with these broader themes across Western Asia and the Mediterranean, adopting an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to understanding temporal and spatial variability. This book is of relevance for students and researchers of Ancient Western Asia, as well as those of the archaeology of death and burial.
Augustine the African
by Catherine Conybeare
Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies
Publishes August 12, 2025 - Pre-Order now!
Augustine of Hippo (354-430), also known as Saint Augustine, was one of the most influential theologians in history. His writings, including the autobiographical Confessions and The City of God, helped shape the foundations of Christianity and Western philosophy. But for many centuries, Augustine's North African birth and Berber heritage have been simply dismissed. Catherine Conybeare, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, here puts the "African" back in Augustine's story. As she relates, his seminal books were written neither in Rome nor in Milan, but in Africa, where he had returned as a wanderer during a perilous time when the Western Roman Empire was crumbling. Using extant letters and other shards of evidence, Conybeare retraces Augustine's travels, revealing how his groundbreaking works emerge from an exile's perspective within an African context. In its depiction of this Christian saint, Augustine the African upends conventional wisdom and traces core ideas of Christian thought to their origins on the African continent.
Chaplaincy and Seafarers
by Wendy Cadge et al
President and Professor of Sociology
This book explores the faith, work, and lives of port chaplains and seafarers.
It draws on archive materials, fieldwork in ports and on cargo ships, and interviews with chaplains in the UK and overseas. The volume presents a detailed picture of seafarers' attitudes to working in mixed faith crews, their understandings of their own faith and its role and negotiation in a life at sea, and their needs with regard to faith and more general welfare support. In addition, it describes the daily life and work of port chaplains, how they understand their roles in relation to their own faith, and how they manage their work in a multi-faith environment. In producing this rich account, the perspectives of relevant stakeholders and the historical underpinnings of port chaplaincy have also been considered, alongside the ways in which port chaplaincy compares with other forms of chaplaincy about which rather more has, hitherto, been known.
Drawing Down the Moon
by Radcliffe Edmonds
An unparalleled exploration of magic in the Greco-Roman world
What did magic mean to the people of ancient Greece and Rome? How did Greeks and Romans not only imagine what magic could do, but also use it to try to influence the world around them? In Drawing Down the Moon, Radcliffe Edmonds, one of the foremost experts on magic, religion, and the occult in the ancient world, provides the most comprehensive account of the varieties of phenomena labeled as magic in classical antiquity. Exploring why certain practices, images, and ideas were labeled as "magic" and set apart from "normal" kinds of practices, Edmonds gives insight into the shifting ideas of religion and the divine in the ancient past and later Western tradition. Using fresh approaches to the history of religions and the social contexts in which magic was exercised, Edmonds delves into the archaeological record and classical literary traditions to examine images of witches, ghosts, and demons as well as the fantastic powers of metamorphosis, erotic attraction, and reversals of nature, such as the famous trick of drawing down the moon. From prayer and divination to astrology and alchemy, Edmonds journeys through all manner of ancient magical rituals and paraphernalia--ancient tablets, spell books, bindings and curses, love charms and healing potions, and amulets and talismans. He considers the ways in which the Greco-Roman discourse of magic was formed amid the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, including Egypt and the Near East. An investigation of the mystical and marvelous, Drawing Down the Moon offers an unparalleled record of the origins, nature, and functions of ancient magic.Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership
by Alison Cook-Sather, Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor, Department of Education
Faculty and staff in higher education are looking for ways to address the deep inequity and systemic racism that pervade our colleges and universities. Pedagogical partnership can be a powerful tool to enhance equity, inclusion, and justice in our classrooms and curricula. These partnerships create opportunities for students from underrepresented and equity-seeking groups to collaborate with faculty and staff to revise and reinvent pedagogies, assessments, and course designs, positioning equity and justice as core educational aims. When students have a seat at the table, previously unheard voices are amplified, and diversity and difference introduce essential perspectives that are too often overlooked.In particular, the book contributes to the literature on pedagogical partnership and equity in education by integrating theory, synthesizing research, and providing concrete examples of the ways partnership can contribute to more equitable educational systems. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that partnership can only realize its full potential to redress harms and promote equity and justice when thoughtfully enacted. This book is a resource that will inspire and challenge a wide variety of higher education faculty and staff and contribute to advancing both practice and research on the potential of student-faculty pedagogical partnerships. Presenting a conceptual framework for understanding the various epistemological, affective, and ontological harms that face students from equity-seeking groups in postsecondary education, Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership applies this conceptual framework to current literature in partnerships, highlighting the promise of partnership as the way to redress these harms. The authors ground both the conceptual framework and the literature review by offering two case studies of pedagogical partnership in practice. They then explore the complexities raised by their framework, including the conditions under which partnerships themselves may risk reproducing epistemic, affective, or ontological harms. Applying the framework in this way allows them to propose strategies that make it more likely for these mediations to be successful. Finally, the authors focus on the future of pedagogical partnership and share their perspectives on new directions for inquiry and practice. After summarizing the overarching themes developed throughout the book, the authors leave the reader with a set of questions and recommendations for further inquiry and discussion.
A Series on Engaged Learning and Teaching Book. Visit the books' companion website, hosted by the Center for Engaged Learning, for book resources.
Social Work Sociometry and Psychodrama
by Scott Giacomucci
Cambridge Companion to Gadamer
by Robert Dostal, Rufus M. Jones Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy
Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at Dune and the Lord of the Rings
by Willow DiPasquale
Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Program
Analyzing how the mythopoeic fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert portray the natural world
Finding the Numinous explores the premise that the environments depicted in The Lord of the Rings and the Dune saga are not only for the purpose of world-building; rather, these imagined worlds' environments are sacred spaces fundamental to understanding these texts and their authors' purposes. Willow Wilson DiPasquale applies Tolkien's three functions of fantasy--recover, escape, and consolation--to demonstrate how both authors' works are intrinsically connected to their ecocritical messages and overarching moral philosophies.
This book also compares Tolkien's Roman Catholic viewpoint with Herbert's Zen Buddhist perspective, arguing that the authors' religious beliefs and biographical, historical, and cultural influences impacted how they chose to craft their creative works and write about nature.
Applying various ecocritical positions to the text, Finding the Numinous explores descriptions of the natural landscapes in both authors' texts, as well as the relationships characters and communities have with those natural spaces. As our current society's relationships with nature are increasingly challenged and changed by various ecocrises, DiPasquale convincingly argues, these worlds offer readers various environmental models to critique, to condemn, or, in some cases, to adopt.
Gadamer's Hermeneutics
by Robert Dostal, Rufus M. Jones Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy
Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel
by Pardis Dabashi