2012 IFS Participants and Abstracts

Joan Branham
Seminar Leader
Art and Art History

Building for Blood: Sacrifice, Gender, and Architecture in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity

Multivalent meanings of blood abound in the religious, gendered, and architectural systems of ancient Judaism and early Christianity.  Bloody pieces of furniture—altars—dominate liturgical landscapes, and blood-thirsty deities demand sacrifice.  Utilizing interdisciplinary approaches, I hope to examine blood’s prominent role within three spatial and bodily arenas, and the interrelationship among them: 1) the sacrificial courtyard of the Jewish Temple in ancient Jerusalem, 2) the altar area of early ecclesiastical architecture, and 3) women's bodily space—the monthly locus of generative, reproductive blood, or menses.

Kathleen Cornely
Chemistry and Biochemistry

The Role of Red Blood Cell Proteins in Health and Disease

Red blood cell proteins can be used as models to illustrate the concepts of structure/function relationships in proteins and the molecular basis of inherited disease. The replacement of a single amino acid in hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein of the red blood cell, results in the genetically inherited disease sickle cell anemia. Another red blood cell protein, the membrane-dwelling phospholipid translocase enzyme, maintains the asymmetry of the red blood cell membrane, an important process in the regulation of apoptosis, or programmed cell death.

Chard deNiord
English

The Witness of Blood, Lines to Arteries in the Body of American Poetry

This presentation will focus on traditional and contemporary American poems that employ images, metaphors and symbols of blood in their function of memorializing and presaging periods of social, political racial and religious sea change in American history. It will examine how the authors of memorable poems of witness exploit blood as both an image and conceit for conveying the life force of American life, as well as loss of life, from America’s provenance to the present. In conclusion, it will argue that blood as a poetic device serves as the indelible ink whose nature is paradoxical in both its static and fluid quality—its dry and fluid states as legible poetic record and ambiguous Rorschach of present and future life, the unwritten fluid lines and forms of the present age.

Ian Christopher Levy
Theology

Redemptive Blood and Ecclesiastical Authority in the Middle Ages

My contribution to the 2012 Providence College Faculty Seminar will first analyze the specifically sacrificial role of Christ’s blood in the Eucharist as understood by the medieval theologians and canon lawyers; and second will examine the great controversy that erupted in fifteenth-century Bohemia over the refusal of the chalice to the laity. Hence the intersection of blood and authority, or more specifically the access to divine redemptive power, will be the focus of my work.

Patrick MacFarlane
Philosophy

Blood in Ancient Greek Medical and Philosophical Texts

My contribution focuses on blood as one of the four basic humors (along with bile, black bile, and phlegm) in Hippocratic medicine and the centrality of blood in Aristotle's complex psycho-physiology. The Hippocratics and other ancient Greek medical writers largely held that the presence or absence of blood, along with its balance and mixture with the other humors in the body, accounted for health and disease. Ancient Greek philosophers, such as the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle, integrate this medical understanding into their own philosophical works while at the same time explore the role blood plays in more typically "philosophical" accounts of phenomena such as sense perception and animal motion.

We will look at poetry written in English, including some of my own, and poetry translated from German and Russian. The unique connection between blood and racism will be emphasized. A deeper understanding of blood as a symbol and metaphor will transcend the banality of the profane.

Charles Toth
Biology