Lesleigh Cushing

Back to Directory

Lesleigh Cushing

Provost and Dean of the Faculty; Mark S. Siegel University Professor in Religion and Jewish Studies

Department/Office Information

Dean of the Faculty/Provost, Jewish Studies

104 McGregory Hall

Contact

lcushing@colgate.edu (315) 228-7222

These days, my research projects fall into three overlapping categories: the literariness of the (Hebrew) Bible, the literary afterlife of the Bible, and the use of the Bible in contemporary culture.

Recent examples of my exploration of the literariness of the Hebrew Bible include a consideration of the interplay ritual and memory in the Book of Exodus (published in Religion and Literature) and an analysis of the intertextual dimensions in the Genesis stories of Dinah (Gen. 34) and Tamar (Gen. 38).

My current work on the literary afterlife of the Bible is most evident inThe Bible in the American Short Story, a collaboration with Peter S. Hawkins of Yale Divinity School, that will be part of Bloomsbury's New Directions in Religion and Literature series. A 2016 article on Midrash in contemporary Jewish American literature also explores the return to and reuse of the Bible in contemporary literature.

I also have a second book project underway, which is concerned with the Bible in the American public sphere. Reading the Bible from the Left looks at the ways the Bible has been used in American public and political discourse, with a view to the way it has been read in debates about abortion, homosexuality, the environment, capital punishment, marriage, poverty, and euthanasia.

BA, McGill University, 1993; MTS, Harvard Divinity School, 1995; PhD, Boston University, 2002

Biblical Hermeneutics (particularly literary approaches to the Hebrew Bible, the Bible, and gender)
The Reception of the Bible (Bible and literature; Scripture and Literary Arts; Midrash)
Bible in American life and culture

Biblical Studies
Judaism
Gender and Judaism
Post-biblical Jewish literature

Books

The Bible in the American Short Story. Peter S. Hawkins, co-author. Bloomsbury. New Directions in Religion and Literature Series. Forthcoming: November 2017.

Sustaining Fictions: Intertextuality, Midrash, Translation, and the Literary Afterlife of the Bible. New York: T & T Clark, 2008.

Co-Edited Volumes

From the Margins: Women of the Hebrew Bible and their Afterlives. Peter S. Hawkins, co-editor. Sheffield UK: Sheffield-Phoenix, 2009.

Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs. Peter S. Hawkins, co-editor. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006.

Guest Editor

Served as guest editor of an issue of Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues. The focus of the issue is the reception of biblical women. (Spring 5773/ 2013)

Articles and chapters in books

“Sex and the Singular Girl: Dinah, Tamar, and the Corrective Art of Biblical Narrative”
Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture Volume 47, Issue 4 (November 2017)

“The Book of Ruth: Between Story and History, Between Sacred and Secular (or, Scripture for the Pew’s Jews)” The Journal of Textual Reasoning 9.1 (June 2016)

������ϲʹ���