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.
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.
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
Bread and Circus
by Airea D Matthews - Associate Professor and Co-Chair of Creative Writing
Author's website: www.aireadee.com
This is the 2023 hardcover edition of this collection. Click here to go to the 2024 paperback.
Drawing upon economics, theology, and psychology, Bread and Circus explores the lived experiences of those impacted by poverty and racial injustice. This poetry collection is innovative not only in its dissection of established ideals but also in its experimentation with poetic form, with a highlight being blackout poems made by subverting key words in economic texts. The final section of the collection is an especially moving series on collective grief and hope.
-Alyssa S., GSSWSR '24
"A sharp memoir in verse." --LitHub This powerful and timely collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia's former Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews about the economics of class is a brilliant intellectual and artistic contribution to the ongoing conversation about American inequality. As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith's magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Now, she presents a direct challenge to Smith's theory of the invisible hand, which claims self-interest is the key to optimal economic outcomes. By juxtaposing redacted texts by Smith and the French Marxist Guy Debord with autobiographical prose and poems, Bread and Circus personally offers how self-interest fails when it reduces people to commodity and spectacle. A layered collection to be read and reread, with poems that range from tragic to humorous, in forms as varied and nuanced as the ideas the book considers, Bread and Circus asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished, and at what cost. "Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequity" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and is ideal for fans of Elizabeth Alexander, Natalie Diaz, Eve Ewing, and Gregory Pardlo.
Queer Budapest, 1873-1961
by Anita Kurimay