From Africa to Interest Groups and Beyond: Recent Bowdoin Faculty Books

Books by Bowdoin faculty members are continuing to shape disciplines and garner widespread recognition. Recent faculty books include the following titles:

Lady E. S. Drower's Scholarly Correspondence: An Intrepid English Autodidact in Iraq (Brill, 2012)
Associate Professor of Religion Jorunn J. Buckley, editor

Jorunn BuckleyBuckley has edited a collection of the scholarly letters of Lady E. S. Drower, renowned for her novels, travel accounts, and studies in the Middle East, particularly on the Mandaeans.

Buckley’s book presents a window into the world of this self-taught scholar, who by many accounts, insisted on — and succeeded in attaining — a place among the academics. Drower kept up a lively correspondence with scholars; the letters in Buckley’s book span the years 1938 to the mid‐1960s.

"The picture that Buckley presents of the intellectual world of the 1930s to the 1960s is a fascinating one, in which a tacit battle is fought between pioneering field-workers who recognize that religion and culture are rooted in a complex web of society, material culture, language and imagery, i.e. a world of religious practise, and stuffy bigoted theologians for whom pure religious theory must remain untainted from the contemporary observations of a woman not conversant in Greek and Hebrew," wrote Matthew Morgenstern, senior lecturer in the Hebrew language department at the University of Haifa, in a review.

Read about more books by Bowdian faculty here.