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How is it that the prolific nineteenth-century sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel is largely forgotten today? Ezekiel was the first renowned Jewish American artist and one of the most popular artist-celebrities of his day. In terms of drama his life story rivals Alexander Hamilton's. Ezekiel fought for the Confederacy at the Battle of New Market as a ......
Reading Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy
Over the past century, the Italian landscape has undergone exceedingly rapid transformations, shifting from a mostly rural environment to a decidedly modern world. This changing landscape is endowed with a narrative agency that transforms how we understand our surroundings. Situated at the juncture of Italian studies and ecocriticism and following ......
First published in 1653, The Compleat Angler is one of the most influential environmental texts ever written. Addressing a politically and religiously polarized nation devastated by warfare, disease, ecological degradation, and climate change, Izaak Walton's famous fishing treatise stages a radical thought experiment: how might humanity's enhanced ......
Mizrahi-Arab-Ashkenazi Relations Since the Dawn of Zionism
Originally published in Hebrew in 2021, Hillel Cohen's Enemies, A Love Story argues that to understand the ongoing conflict in Palestine/Israel we need to examine the interactions among three identity groups: Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, and Arabs. Refusing to treat Jewish society as a monolith, Cohen shows how the ethnic divide between Ashkenazim (Jews ......
This book examines the active political life of Luisa Carvajal y Mendoza (1566–1614), a poet and mystic who renounced her noble birthright for an ascetic, spiritual life.
Forgery, Theft, and Sainthood in the Seventeenth Century
On the night of March 18, 1655, two Spanish friars broke into a church to steal the bones of the founder of their religious institution, the Order of the Most Holy Trinity. This book investigates this little-known incident of relic theft and the lengthy legal case that followed, together with the larger questions that surround the remains of ......
Bernardino Ochino was one of the most celebrated Italian Catholic preachers of the sixteenth century-until the Roman Inquisition forced him into exile. But rather than silencing him, displacement granted Ochino an unprecedented platform: unimpeded access to the printing press and the ability to spread his ideas across Europe. In this ......
