Got Jewish Milk? Screening Epstein and Van Sant for Intersectional Film History

A B ST R A C T Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk (USA, 1984) and Gus Van Sant’s Milk (USA, 2008), the two major films that narrate the life and tragically dramatic death of gay politician and activist Harvey Milk (1930–1978), are widely recognized as part of the queer cinematic canon but are less often categorized as Jewish films. While Epstein’s film adroitly presents a “Kosher-style” Milk, the Jewishness of Van Sant’s Milk is less certain; however, a well-established pattern of gay and lesbian Jews citing Milk as one of their own—what I term “Jewqhooing”—enabled a Jewish reception of Milk. Querying and queerying the Jewishness of Milk (the man as well as the movies that purport to represent his life and times) illuminate the complex ways Jewishness continues to be cinematically conveyed or whitewashed as well as the intersections between queer and Jewish film history

The Unmarked Chains of Paper Clips

Argues that the documentary Paper Clips exemplifies the ways in which Holocaust education can unwittingly foster competing victimization narratives between blacks and Jews, sanitize both European and U.S. history, and serve subtle but pernicious forms of supersessionism

"Woman in Gold"

Film review of Woman in Gold (2015) as a cinematic rendering of the material turn in Holocaust memory

Inflation and Dark Energy from spectroscopy at z > 2

The expansion of the Universe is understood to have accelerated during two epochs: in its very first moments during a period of Inflation and much more recently, at z < 1, when Dark Energy is hypothesized to drive cosmic acceleration. The undiscovered mechanisms behind these two epochs represent some of the most important open problems in fundamental physics. The large cosmological volume at 2 < z < 5, together with the ability to efficiently target high-$z$ galaxies with known techniques, enables large gains in the study of Inflation and Dark Energy. A future spectroscopic survey can test the Gaussianity of the initial conditions up to a factor of ~50 better than our current bounds, crossing the crucial theoretical threshold of $\sigma(f_{NL}^{\rm local})$ of order unity that separates single field and multi-field models. Simultaneously, it can measure the fraction of Dark Energy at the percent level up to $z = 5$, thus serving as an unprecedented test of the standard model and opening up a tremendous discovery space

"Why Do Research?"

PMLA Forum piece that argues for the direct and indirect value of the scholarly enterprise to the sacred art of teaching

‘The Desecration of the Temple’; or, ‘Sexuality as Terrorism’?: Angela Carter's (Post-)feminist Gothic Heroines

Carter's fiction sits uneasily in relation to both Gothic and feminist discourses, especially as they converge through the category of the ‘female Gothic’. Owing to her interest in pornography and her engagement with the sexual/textual violence of specifically ‘male Gothic’ scripts – for example, the Gothic scenarios of Sade, Poe, Hoffmann, Baudelaire and Stoker – Carter's Gothic heroines have frequently been censured as little more than objects of sadistic male desires by feminist critics. This article re-reads Carter's sexual/textual violations – her defiance of dominant feminist and Gothic categories and categorisations – through the problematic of (post-)feminist discourse and, especially, the tension between ‘victim’ and ‘power’ feminisms as prefigured in her own (Gothic) treatise on female sexual identity, The Sadeian Woman (1979). Mapping the trajectory of her Gothic heroine from Ghislaine in Shadow Dance (1966) to Fevvers in Nights at the Circus (1984), it re-contextualises Carter's engagements with the Gothic as a dialogue with both the female Gothic and feminist discourse