Contributors

Contributors Francisca Cho is associate professor of Buddhist studies at Georgetown University. Her book, Embracing Illusion: Truth and Fiction in the Dream of the Nine Clouds (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996) examines the expression of Buddhist philosophy in a seventeenth-century Korean classic novel. Recent publications include ‘‘Leaping into the Boundless: A Daoist Reading of Comparative Religious Ethics,’’ in the Journal of Religious Ethics, and ‘‘The Buddhist Theory of Social Action,’’ in Ideal in the World’s Religions. Her recent research and publications focus on Buddhist aesthetics as expressed through East Asian literature and film. Linda C. Ehrlich is associate professor of Japanese, comparative literature, and cinema at Case Western Reserve University, and has published articles on world cinema in Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Literature/ Film Quarterly, Film Criticism, Cinemaya, Journal of Film and Video, Ethnomusicology, and Journal of Religion and Film, among others. She has coedited (with David Desser) Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan (University of Texas Press, 1994; 2d. ed., 2000). Her second book, An Open Window: The Cinema of Víctor Erice, appeared in the Scarecrow Press Filmmakers Series in 2000. She is currently finishing an anthology of essays on sculptural images in the cinema entitled A Particular Slant of Light. Kris Jozajtis completed his Ph.D. on religion and film in American culture at the University of Stirling in 2001. Since that time he has taught at Stirling in the departments of religious studies and film and media studies. His work on the use of media in religious education in schools prompted worldwide interest, and he is currently writing a book based on his doctoral disserta- tion. He is also developing a career in radio, as a producer and presenter of his own show for Heartland FM. He lives in Stirling with his partner and four children. Philip Lutgendorf has taught in the University of Iowa’s Department of Asian Languages and Literature since 1985. He regularly offers Hindi language classes as well as courses on written and oral narrative traditions of South Asia, including Indian film. His book on the performance of the epic Ramayana, The Life of a Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) won the A. K. Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association for 264 CONTRIBUTORS Asian Studies. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002–03 for his book project on the popular ‘‘monkey-god’’ Hanuman, which he has also treated in several articles. Birgit Meyer is a senior lecturer at the Research Centre Religion and Society (Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam). Her publications include Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (edited with Peter Geschiere, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). In April 2000 she was awarded a PIONIER grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research for a comparative research program on modern mass media, religion, and the postcolonial state in West Africa, India, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Paul Nathanson does research at the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University. Nathanson’s interest in the frontier between religion and secularity, along with coming of age, led to his first book: Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991). He has published numerous journal articles on popular culture and religion, including ‘‘Coming of Age in the Movies: Myth and Manhood in Rebel without a Cause’’ in Gender in World Religions, and ‘‘You Can’t Go Home Again, or Can You? Reflections on the Symbolism of TV Families at Christmastime’’ in Journal of Popular Culture. He has collaborated with Katherine K. Young on several research projects, including Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). Their most recent project is on the moral, philosophical, and other implications of current demands for the legalization of gay marriage. S. Brent Plate is assistant professor of religion and the visual arts at Texas Christian University, where he teaches the courses ‘‘Myth and Ritual on Film’’ and ‘‘Religion and Visual Culture.’’ Recent publications include the edited volumes, Religion, Art, and Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2002) and Imag(in)ing Otherness: Filmic Visions of Living Together, coedited with David Jasper (Atlanta and Oxford: American Academy of Religion/Oxford University Press, 1999), as well as the journal articles ‘‘Looking at the Body of Death,’’ in Soundings; and ‘‘The Re-creation of the World: Filming Faith,’’ in Dialog. He is currently preparing a manuscript on Walter Benjamin’s religious aesthetics, forthcoming with Routledge. Lloyd Ridgeon lectures on Islamic studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, at the University of Glasgow. His major publications include Aziz Nasafi (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1998) and Persian Meta- CONTRIBUTORS 265 physics and Mysticism (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2003). He has also published an article on Makhamlabaf entitled ‘‘Makhmalbaf’s Broken Mirror,’’ in Durham Middle East Papers. Edna M. Rodríguez-Mangual is assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Texas Christian University. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection between cultural expressions (especially literature and film) and nation building. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera, analyzing the representation of Afro-Cubans and Santeria as an alternative national discourse. Her most recent publication is the essay ‘‘Driving a Dead Body through the Nation: Death and Allegory in the Film Guantanamera,’’ in the journal Chasqui. Antonio D. Sison is a Ph.D./Th.D. candidate from the Philippines currently doing research on the confluence of Edward Schillebeeckx’s eschatology and Third Cinema at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. He taught at the Ateneo de Manila University, the premier Jesuit university in Asia, prior to his doctoral research in the Netherlands. Sison complements his academic interest in theology and cinema with screenwriting. His first screenplay, 9 Mornings, a modern-day parable of conversion, was awarded second place in a national screenwriting contest and enjoyed a successful run when it was released as a film in the Philippines in October 2002. Luis A. Vivanco is assistant professor of anthropology and director of the Latin American studies program at the University of Vermont. He holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Princeton University. He has done ethnographic research and published articles on the cultural politics of nature conservation and ecotourism in Costa Rica and Oaxaca, Mexico. He is a coeditor of Talking About People: A Reader in Contemporary Cultural Anthropology (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000) and is currently finishing a monograph on the environmental movement in rural Costa Rica. Judith Weisenfeld is associate professor of religion at Vassar College. She is the author of African-American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), co-editor (with Richard Newman) of This Far By Faith: Readings in African American Women’s Religious Biography (New York: Routledge, 1996), and coeditor (with Christine diStefano and Priscilla Wald) of a special issue of SIGNS (1999). She is the recipient of grants from the American Academy of Religion and the NEH and has been a visiting fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at Yale. Prof. Weisenfeld is currently working on Hollywood Be Thy Name: African-American 266 CONTRIBUTORS Religion in American Film, 1929–1950 (forthcoming with University of California Press). Janet Wilson is reader in English at University College Northampton. Her research interests are in linguistics, postcolonial writing, and New Zealand literature. Publications include the edited Preaching in the Reformation (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993) and Intimate Stranger (Wellington: Steel Roberts, 2000), reminiscences of the New Zealand writer and publisher Dan Davin. She is currently editor of World Literature Written in English and secretary of the New Zealand Studies Association in the United Kingdom. INDEX Abu-Lughod, Lila, 12 Berlin Film Festival, 182 Academy Awards, 72 Bernstock, Judith, 69 Adah, Anthony, 209, 212 Beyond the Mountain, 11, 110, 114–18 Adventures of Priscilla the Queen of the see also Chung Jiyong Desert, The, 199 Birth of a Nation, The, 12, 240–56 Alea, Tomas Gutiérrez, 183, see also Griffith, D. W. 224–25, 229, 232 Blanchot, Maurice, 83–84 Guantanamera, 232–33 Bonnefoy, Yves, 83 La última cena, 225, 229–31 Bordwell, David, 3 Strawberry and Chocolate, 232 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7 Una pelea cubana contra los Brahma, 30, 31 demonios, 225–26, 227, 229 Brahmani, 30, 31 ‘Ali, 147 Brakhage, Stan, 10 Allen, Woody, 11, 89–93, 95, Braudy, Leo, 3 98, 100, 101 Brazil, 71, 72, 73 Manhattan, 90 Brazilian film, 71 see also Shadows and Fog see also Cinema Novo Anderson, Benedict, 240 Broken English, 198, 207, 210–12 Andrew, Dudley, 70, 76 Brown, Norman O., 146 apocalyptic, 11–12, 145–49, 155–56 Brown, Royal, 79 Apollo, 68, 69 Browning, Barbara, 72 Apollonian, 69, 79 Buddha, 6, 109, 110, 112–13, Appadurai, Arjun, 130 115, 116, 117 Australia, 1, 197 Buddhism/Buddhist, 11, 76, 108–11, Australian film, 199 112–16, 118 avant-garde, 12, 93–94 Mahayana, 112,

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