My books

My first book, Baal and the Politics of Poetry (2018), explores the relationship between political thought and mythological poetry in ancient Syria during the Late Bronze Age. The book proposed a new interpretation of the Ugaritic Baal Epic and introduced a new model for reading ancient literature in conjunction with ancient politics.

My second book, The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (2020), is a response to the Islamic State video of antiquities destruction in Iraq’s Mosul Museum that went viral on the Internet in 2015. In it, I reflect on why people over the centuries have felt a need to destroy images and what this means for our ability to live together politically. The book was written for a broad audience without academic jargon; you can read the prologue here. A French translation was published in 2022, which led to an interview in Le Monde.

Together with Josh Ellenbogen, I have also edited the anthology Idol Anxiety, which collects essays by prominent thinkers across numerous disciplines from art history to philosophy to religious studies. It grew out of an exhibition that I curated at the David and Alfred Smart Museum in Chicago in 2008.