This groundbreaking book explores the current state of doctoral education in the United States and offers a plan for increasing the effectiveness of doctoral education. Programs must grapple with questions of purpose. The authors examine practices and elements of doctoral programs and show how they can be made more powerful by relying on principles of progressive development, integration, and collaboration. They challenge the traditional apprenticeship model and offer an alternative in which students learn while apprenticing with several faculty members. The authors persuasively argue that creating intellectual community is essential for high-quality graduate education in every department. Knowledge-centered, multigenerational communities foster the development of new ideas and encourage intellectual risk taking.

Although academic study of the Grateful Dead began shortly after the group’s formation, the dramatic growth of scholarly literature only occurred after the band’s formal retirement of the name in 1995. One major incubator of much of this work has been the Grateful Dead area of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association. Inaugurated as a separate section in 1998 and nicknamed the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, it has produced almost three hundred papers over fifteen years, nearly a third of which have been revised for publication. Caucus presenters have also edited a dozen books and periodical volumes, all of which have drawn on Caucus presentations, some almost exclusively. Studying the Dead: The Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus provides an informal history of the Caucus and sketches its significance as a scholarly community, focusing on its increasing self-awareness, its ability to span diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, and most of all, its contribution to our understanding of the Grateful Dead phenomenon. For the academy as a whole, the Caucus is a fascinating model for the development of discourse communities, from the role of orality to its interrogation of the texts that are derived from them. Remarkable for its interdisciplinary dialogue, the Caucus demonstrates how the nature of the art—and the phenomenon that it studies—can shape these discourses. Though ostensibly aimed at scholars of the Grateful Dead, others who will find this book of interest include students and teachers of popular culture, as well as fans of the band.

David Carr rethinks both the methods and historical orientation points for research into the growth of the Hebrew Bible into its present form.

This book examines the talmudic writings, politics, and ideology of Y.I. Halevy (1847-1914), one of the most influential representatives of the pre-war eastern European Orthodox Jewish community. It analyzes Halevy’s historical model of the formation of the Babylonian Talmud, which, he argued, was edited by an academy of rabbis beginning in the fourth century and ending by the sixth century. Halevy's model also served as a blueprint for the rabbinic council of Agudath Israel, the Orthodox political body in whose founding he played a leading role. Foreword by Jay M. Harris, Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University and the author of How Do We Know This? Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism, among other works.

Essays presented are adapted papers read at the 7th Nordic New Testament Conference in Stavanger, Norway, June 14-18, 2003.

The fourteen studies included in this volume have been chosen to serve several purposes simultaneously. At a basic level, they aim to provide a general - if not wholly systematic - coverage of the emergence and evolution of law during the first three and a half centuries of Islam. On another level, they reflect the different and, at times, widely divergent scholarly approaches to this subject matter. These two levels combined will offer a useful account of the rise of Islamic law not only for students in this field but also for Islamicists who are not specialists in matters of law, comparative legal historians, and others. At the same time, however, and as the Introduction to the work argues, this collection of distinguished contributions illustrates both the achievements and the shortcomings of paradigmatic scholarship on the formative period of Islamic law.

Against the background of long-standing narratives in which Twelver Shi'ism is viewed as fundamentally authoritarian, The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi'i Islamic Tradition builds upon recent scholarship in the fields of Religious Studies, Anthropology, and History to argue that Twelver Shi'ism is better understood as a discursive tradition. At a conceptual level, this solves the basic problem of how to integrate the extraordinary diversity of Twelver Shi'ism across time and space into a single historical category without engaging in a normative assessment of its underlying essence. Furthermore, in light of this conception of tradition, the School of Hillah stands out as a seminal period in the archive of Twelver Shi'ism, though it has seldom been recognized as such in European-language scholarship. Insofar as it gave birth to a conversation that would prove capable of encompassing the dynamism of Twelver Shi'ism, the School of Hillah should be considered the formative period of Twelver Shi'i tradition. Moreover, when the tradition is conceptualized in this manner, it is a bulwark against the very authoritarianism by which Twelver Shi'ism has been characterized for so long.