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Editorial Techniques in the Hebrew Bible: Toward a Refined Literary Criticism presents and applies a model for understanding and reconstructing the diachronic development of the Hebrew Bible through historical criticism (or the historical-critical method). Reinhard Müller and Juha Pakkala refine the methodologies of literary and redaction criticism through a systematic investigation of the evidence of additions, omissions, replacements, and transpositions that are documented by divergent ancient textual traditions. At stake is not only historical criticism but also the Hebrew Bible as a historical source, for historical criticism has been and continues to be the only method to unwind those scribal changes that left no traces in textual variants.

A fascinating exploration of the symbolic place animals hold within our culture.

Differentiation from animals helped to establish the notion of a human being, but the disappearance of animals now threatens that identity. This is the argument underlying Electric Animal, a probing exploration of the figure of the animal in modern culture. Akira Mizuta Lippit shows us the animal as a crucial figure in the definition of modernity—essential to developments in the natural sciences and technology, radical transformations in modern philosophy and literature, and the advent of psychoanalysis and the cinema.

Moving beyond the dialectical framework that has traditionally bound animal and human being, Electric Animal raises a series of questions regarding the idea of animality in Western thought. Can animals communicate? Do they have consciousness? Are they aware of death? By tracing questions such as these through a wide range of texts by writers ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud to Vicki Hearne, Lewis Carroll to Franz Kafka, and Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Deleuze, Lippit arrives at a remarkable thesis, revealing an extraordinary logical consensus in Western thought: animals do not have language and hence cannot die. The animal has, accordingly, haunted thought as a form of spectral and undead being. Lippit demonstrates how, in the late nineteenth century, this phantasmic concept of animal being reached the proportions of an epistemological crisis, engendering the disciplines and media of psychoanalysis, modern literature, and cinema, among others. Against the prohibitive logic of Western philosophy, these fields opened a space for rethinking animality. Technology, usually thought of in opposition to nature, came to serve as the repository for an unmournable animality-a kind of vast wildlife museum. A highly original work that charts new territory in current debates over language and mortality, subjectivity and technology, Electric Animal brings to light fundamental questions about the status of representation—of the animal and of ourselves—in the age of biomechanical reproduction.

2026 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Edited Works Award Winner

Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays that analyzes the phenomenon of immersive, participatory performance as it has developed in the US. As this collection demonstrates, immersive performance offers three-dimensional multisensory experiences, inviting audience members to be participants in the unfolding of the story, and challenging pre-existing ideas about the function of performance and entertainment. Enveloping Worlds questions audience agency and choice, the space and boundaries of performance, modes of immersion, empathy and engagement, and ethical considerations through fifteen essays. 

Case studies in the volume include the Choctaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma and Choctaw sovereignty; a Black artist’s autoethnographic performance challenging White audiences’ entitlement to full inclusion; Immersive Van Gogh experiences and their scenographers; telephone performance during the COVID-19 lockdowns; Diane Paulus’s The Donkey Show; the Battle of Atlanta panorama; an antebellum-themed department store display from the 1920s; escape rooms; Disney Parks; remotely staged plays about aging and dementia; tiki bars; anachronistic costuming at Renaissance Festivals; the technologies that shape the boundaries of immersive worlds; and tabletop role-playing games. Taken together, these essays contribute a rich discussion of immersive performance across radically different contexts, offering analytical models and terminology with which to clarify and advance this emergent discourse.

Erotic Knowledge explores how US lesbian feminists raised questions about the political stakes of sexual freedom, how their distinctive political vocabularies informed coalition- and institution-building in ways that strain against contemporary queer and feminist assumptions, and how these alternative grammars were left behind in the decades since lesbian feminism’s remarkable surge in the 1970s. Elena Gambino makes the case that the past of US lesbian feminism is rich in resources not only for rethinking vital questions of sexual freedom in the present, but also for incorporating these questions into a broader understanding of the silencing effects of disciplinary historical knowledge. Drawing on archival sources typically ignored in political theory, such as lesbian feminist poetry, literary criticism, and the publications of small presses and periodicals, Gambino argues that the full extent of lesbian feminists’ contributions should be seen as a distinctive form of political analysis that which can guide lesbian feminist interventions in sexual intimacy, epistemology, and institution-building.