TACOMA, Wash. – University of Puget Sound professors who teach in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities program have produced a rich trove of scholarly works over the past year, after putting pen to paper on subjects ranging from Nietzsche to the Irish novel to Roman identity to asceticism in the Middle Ages.
Working from many years of research and analysis, four humanities professors published books: Rob Garratt, professor emeritus, humanities and English; Paul Loeb, professor of philosophy; Eric Orlin, professor of classics; and David Tinsley, distinguished professor of German, foreign languages, and literature. The series of publications were celebrated with an event held by the faculty of the humanities program and a congratulatory note from President Ronald R. Thomas.
“These four works are not only outstanding books in their fields, but they reflect the high caliber of the scholars whom I have the honor of working with at Puget Sound,” said Kent Hooper, director of the humanities program. “I was quite moved when I listened to each of them talk about their books and the writing process. Their devotion to their subjects and the heart and soul they put into the writing epitomized all that each of us aim for in pursuing the trail of humanities studies.”
Rob Garratt’s book Trauma and History in the Irish Novel: The Return of the Dead (Palgrave MacMillan, November 2010) examines traumatic memory in the fiction of Irish writers J. G. Farrell, Julia O'Faolain, William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston, John McGahern, Patrick McCabe, and Sebastian Barry. Garratt examines how a perception that “history repeats itself” gnawed at Irish political thought during the 1970s and 1980s and became a central tenet of the traumatic experience at the heart of these authors’ novels.
Paul Loeb’s The Death of Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Cambridge University Press, April 2010) is a study of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra that proposes a new account of the relation between the book's literary and philosophical aspects. Loeb argues that the book's narrative is designed to embody and exhibit the truth of eternal recurrence, and he explains how its novel design is the key to solving the many riddles of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Eric Orlin wrote Foreign Cults in Rome:Creating a Roman Empire (Oxford University Press, August 2010) to explore how religion contributed to the reshaping of the Roman sense of identity in the wake of their transition from a single city to the dominant power in the Mediterranean basin. The Romans were remarkably open to outside influences, yet the inclusion of so many foreign elements posed difficulties for defining a sense of Romanness at the very moment when the territorial definition became obsolete. Orlin suggests that the methods by which the Romans absorbed cults, priests, and practices allowed them to recreate a clear sense of community that could include the peoples they had conquered.
David Tinsley’s book The Scourge and the Cross: Ascetic Mentalities of the Later Middle Ages (Peeters, May 2010) makes an examination of harsh asceticism in the Dominican convent culture in the 14th century, tackling one of the most troubling and least understood aspects of monastic life in the Later Middle Ages. Tinsley seeks to temper the prevailing view that extreme asceticism is best understood as pathetic or even pathological behavior by exploring late-medieval asceticism on its own terms.
These books can be further explored on the following links:
Rob Garratt: www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=400113
Paul Loeb: www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item5708091/?site_locale=en_GB
David Tinsley: www.peeters-leuven.be/boekoverz.asp?nr=8604
Photo top right: Roman ship with spritsail on the Copenhagen Sarcophagus from the late 3rd century AD. Museum for Ancient Navigation in Mainz, Germany (public domain photo).
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