I’m working on a book to be called, How the Jews Got Religion in which I will argue that the very notion of “religion” is of Christian origins to serve particular discursive needs of Christianity, resisted by Jews–for whom there is not native word that means Judaism until the 18th century. I will be teaching the material for this new book in my Rhetoric of Religion course in Spring 2012, which should be understood as the Rhetoric of “Religion.”
Professor Brown’s fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory, and cultural theory (including feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory). She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. Brown’s current work focuses on the...
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Founding Director . She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984 on the French Reception of Hegel. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of...
On the Medieval side, Clover has published two books and a number of articles on the history and culture of Early Northern Europe (Scandinavia, Anglo-Saxon England, northern Continent). Her interests here range from the origins of narrative prose, the borders between pagan/Christian and oral/literate, and understandings of gender. She is currently researching the role of procedural law and of specific trials in the rise of the prose sagas of early Iceland.
On the Film side, she is working on a book on the relation between the Anglo-American trial and Anglo-American narrative...
Professor Kaes teaches courses in modern German literature, literary and cultural theory, and cinema. In Berkeley since 1981, he was Director of the Film Studies Program (now the Department of Film & Media) from 1991-98 and Chair of the German Department from 2001-2006. He received a Distinguished Teaching Award in the Humanities at Berkeley. His research concentrates on interdisciplinary and comparative aspects of Weimar culture and contemporary literature and film; literary theory and theory of cultural studies; exile, migration and multiculturalism; film history and film...
AB (MCL) (English Language and Literature) Harvard College MA (Celtic Languages and Literatures), Harvard University PhD (Celtic Languages and Literatures), Harvard University