Notes on Contributors

RELIGION and the ARTS Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 210–212 brill.nl/rart

Richard Collins, for many years editor of the Xavier Review, is Chair of Arts, English and Humanities at Louisiana State University at Alexandria. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in London and Romania, has taught in Wales and Bulgaria, and has lectured in China. For the American Zen Association, he introduced and edited In the Belly of the Dragon, Rei Ryu Philippe Coupey’s commentary on the seventh-century Ch’an poem Shin- jinmei. His essay on Kim Ki-Duk’s ﬁ lm Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring appeared in the New Orleans Review, and an essay on African Amer- ican Buddhism will appear soon in the Western Journal of Black Studies.

Nancy Davenport is a Professor of Art History in the Division of Liberal Arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her area of research concerns the diversity of spiritual thought and belief expressed in late nineteenth-century European art. Her publications have included articles on Ultramontane inﬂ uences on the French and Belgian painters and print- makers Marcel Roux and Henry De Groux, the connections between bot- any and mysticism in the work of Odilon Redon, and the inﬂ uence of French Th eosophy on the art of Paul Serusier. Most recently, her research has focused on the frescoes and sacred vessels in churches and monasteries in Germany, the Czech Republic, and the United States by, or inspired by, the Benedictine monks of Beuron, a monastery in the village of Beuron in the state of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen in southwestern Germany.

Max Gimblett (artist, “Honoring the Form: Zen Moves in Charles John- son’s Oxherding Tale”) works primarily on canvas, paper from all countries, and wood panels with gold leaf gilding. He makes unique artist books with poets, and he exhibits around the world. A major monograph was released in 2003 and the catalogue Th e Brush of All Th ings was published in 2004. Gimblett and Lewis Hyde have been working with Oxherding, the text and the 10 pictures, together since 1991. Th e project is completed and will be exhibited at the Japan Society October–January 2010/11.

Diana Gander Ostrander is currently Professor of English and Composition at Anoka Technical College in Anoka, Minnesota. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in English literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, and her Master’s and PhD at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. She brings her studies in Eastern philosophies to her specialization in nineteenth-century British literature in order to discover what philosophical “goods” may have been deliberately or inadvertently carried back to England along the trade routes. In 2007, she completed her dissertation titled, “An Anglo- Indian in Search of Wisdom: W. D. Arnold’s India Pilgrimage,” which explores the body of Arnold’s writings, produced as a military oﬃ cer and later as the ﬁ rst Director of Schools in the Punjab.

Joshua Pederson received his Ph.D. in Religion and Literature from Boston University in 2008. He teaches courses on American literature, religion, the Bible, and college composition at a number of institutions in the New York City area. Recent and forthcoming publications include essays on Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, and Tony Kushner. His current work includes a book-length project on religious syncretism in the work of twentieth-century American authors.

John Renard received a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 1978. Since then he has been teaching courses in Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, religion and the arts, and comparative theology in the Department of Th eological Studies at Saint Louis University. His publications include many books on Islamic religious studies and the history of the major religious traditions. His most recent books are Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood (California, 2008) and Tales of God’s Friends: Islamic Hagiography in Translation (California, 2009).

Devin Zuber (M.A., M.Phil) is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. His research interests include aesthetics, ecocriticsm, and cognitive poetics, with articles appearing in American Quarterly, Green Letters, and Variations. Currently the recipient of the 2010 European Fellowship in North American Studies at the Eccles Centre, British Library, Devin is completing a book entitled Hieroglyphics of Nature: Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination.