This issue of Anthropoetics deals with a variety of cultural texts, from Greek myths to Pushkin and from anti-Americanism to Satanism. We welcome first-time contributor Peter Koper of Central Michigan University. Returning authors include his fellow Michigander Tobin Siebers, a founding member of the Anthropoetics Editorial Board, Dawn Perlmutter, whose interest in Satanic cults and ritual murder (not to speak of her two previous Anthropoetics articles) have brought her nationwide acclaim, and Chris Fleming and John O’Carroll from the University of Western Sydney, whose analysis of anti-Americanism could not be timelier or more necessary.
About Our Contributors
Peter T. Koper is Associate Professor of English at Central Michigan University where he teaches courses in composition, the history of rhetoric, eighteenth century British literature, and classics in translation. His papers and essays have been in these areas and in the American tradition of writing about nature. He was introduced to the work of René Girard and Eric Gans by his sometime colleague Tom Bertonneau, and has become an avid follower of the Chronicles of Love and Resentment. His recent scholarship has melded a continuing interest in the treatments of persuasion in Greek drama with responses to Girard’s uses of those texts. He presented a critique of Girard’s use of Oedipus Rex at the 2002 meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion and a version of the present paper at the 2003 meeting.
Chris Fleming is Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His research interests include theatre and performance, the philosophy of science, and anthropology. His book, René Girard: Violence and Mimesis is forthcoming with Polity Press.
John O’Carroll is Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His research interests lie in the area of the philosophy of communication, postcolonial theory, and Western epistemologies of landscapes (especially in Australia and the South Pacific). He has also taught at the University of the South Pacific (Fiji Laucala campus).
Dawn Perlmutter, Director of the Institute for the Research of Organized and Ritual Violence, is the author of Investigating Religious Terrorism & Ritualistic Crimes (CRC Press), Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art (SUNY Press), Graven Images: Creative Acts of Idolatry (UMI dissertation), and numerous publications on ritual violence in contemporary culture. She regularly consults for and trains law enforcement agencies throughout the United States on identifying and investigating ritualistic crimes and religious terrorism. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy from New York University and a Masters Degree from The American University, Washington, DC.
Tobin Siebers is Director of the Program in Comparative Literature and Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His principal contributions to literary and cultural criticism have been in ethics, but he has also written on the literary criticism of the cold-war era and on the aesthetics and politics of identity. He has been a fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows and the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation, and a Visiting Scholar at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. His major publications include The Mirror of Medusa (California 1983), The Romantic Fantastic (Cornell 1984), The Ethics of Criticism (Cornell 1988), Morals and Stories (Columbia 1992), Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (Oxford 1993), The Subject and Other Subjects: On Ethical, Aesthetic, and Political Identity (Michigan 1998), and Among Men (Nebraska 1999). He is also the editor of Religion and the Authority of the Past (Michigan 1993), Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic (Michigan 1994), and The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification (Michigan 2000). Works in progress include books on disability studies, image theory, and aesthetics and ideology.