CMES affiliated faculty have been busy in 2020. Here are a few highlights of their work. We will be highlighting more in part II!
Peter Bloom (Chair, Film and Media Studies) co-convened a workshop at the Getty Research Institute entitled Narration and Perception in the Archive of Optical Mediation Workshop that was held Feb 20-21, 2020, from which a new media initiative has emerged entitled Distance and Proximity and an edited publication is in the works. Professor Bloom also published “Intersecting Legacies of bandes dessinées and Belgian Colonial Instruction: Les aventures de Mbumbulu in Nos images (1948-55)” in Visualizing Empire: Africa, Europe, and the Politics of Representation (Eds. Rebecca Peabody, Steven Nelson, and Dominic Thomas, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2020); and “Pre-cinema as paradigm and collection at the Getty Research Institute” in Early Popular Visual Culture (2020)
Adrienne Edgar (Associate Professor, History) co-edited Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). This interdisciplinary volume examines the practice and experience of interethnic marriage in a range of countries and eras, from imperial Germany to present-day Tajikistan. Contributors explore the phenomenon of intermarriage both from the top down, in the form of state policies and official categories, and from the bottom up, through an intimate look at the experience and agency of mixed families in modern states determined to control the lives and identities of their citizens to an unprecedented degree.
Mark Juergensmeyer (Professor, Sociology) published God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2020). In this book Professor Juergensmeyer provides an understanding of war and religion from those who have embraced them.
Kathleen Moore (Associate Dean, Humanities and Fine Arts) and her colleague, Mark Fathi Massoud (Director of Legal Studies, UC Santa Cruz), published a paper exploring the meanings Californian Muslims give to and the intentions they derive from shari‘a (commonly translated as Islamic Law) when dominant discourses represent shari‘a as a cause for concern in American life. Mark Fathi Massoud and Kathleen M. Moore, Shari‘a Consciousness: Law and Lived Religion among California Muslims. Law & Social Inquiry, 45(3), 787-817, (2020).
Christine Thomas (Professor, Religious Studies) has an edited volume about religion in Roman Ephesos forthcoming with colleagues. This volume provides a detailed overview of the current state of research on the most important Ephesian projects offering evidence for religious activity during the Roman period. Allen Black, Christine Thomas, Trevor Thompson, eds., Ephesus as a Religious Center Under the Principate (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021).
Read Part II of Faculty News here.
