Dr. Theodora Jankowski, English professor and Director of Academic Affairs at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, recently traveled to UCLA to participate in the Andrew W. Mellon/Sawyer Seminar Series "Homosexualities, from Antiquity to the Present."
Dr. Jankowski's presentation, "Looking for Lesbians: Queer Desire in the Geneva Bible's 'Song of Songs,'" concerned her study of the Geneva Bible, the first English translation of the Bible to be made from the original Hebrew and Koine Greek.
"Since the second person singular pronoun, 'you,' is not gender-marked in English," Jankowski said, "what happens in this translation is that the reader is presented with a series of vignettes of sexual situations involving: a man and a woman; two men; two women; a group of women, etc. Thus, surprisingly, in a canonical religious text which contains prohibitions against homosexual activity, we can find much evidence of this activity."
According to UCLA, "Although the term 'homosexuality' has its own problematic history, the plural version of the word focuses attention on the ways in which scholars analyze patterns of same-sex eroticism in a broad range of historical and theoretical contexts. The seminar program aims to generate dialogue between researchers whose work is based within and across many different humanities disciplines."
For this series, which began this past October and extends until June, UCLA invited scholars in the field to share their findings in both past and present and local and global studies of same-sex desire and relationships.
For more information, please contact Dr. Theodora Jankowski at 570-675-9254 or [email protected].