Mobs: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry

The topic of mobs has resonances in a remarkable number of disciplines and provides a link between past and present―mobs are clearly of much importance today. The idea of mobs provides the context for all the essays and topics in this volume ― from Heraclitus to the writings of Elias Canetti to the notion of internet mobs. The essays here speak to the complex nature of the mob: its defining characteristics and the varying consequences of its behavior. Mobs as a book brings wide-ranging clarity to a topic that touches such disciplines as medieval studies, literature, musicology, theology and philosophy, history, social theory, the development of the early university, and theatre.
Contributors are (in order within the volume): Leonard M. Koff, Ben Schomakers, Bernard S. Bachrach, Nancy van Deusen, Paul W. Knoll, Charlotte Bauer, Andrew Galloway, Robert W. Hanning, Terence Tunberg, Peter Howard, Cornelia Oefelein, Teofilo Ruiz, Richard Taruskin, David B. Rosen, Aino Paasonen and Richard Sogliuzzo.

Nancy van Deusen, holds a Ph.D. in Musicology, Indiana University, Bloomington; is currently Professor of Musicology, Benezet Professor of the Humanities, Claremont Graduate University, and is Director of the Claremont Consortium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Claremont Colleges and Graduate University. She has taught widely at Indiana University, the University of Basel, Switzerland, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Central European University, Budapest, and within the California State University system. She has received American Philosophical Society, numerous NEH, and Fulbright grants; and has published on music within the medieval city of Rome, music, liturgy, and institutional structure within the medieval cathedral milieu of Nevers, France, the medieval sequence within its Latin codicological and paleographical contexts, as well as its significance for the history of ideas; music as medieval science and within the curriculum of the early university.
Leonard Michael Koff holds a B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an associate of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, where he has taught and developed on campus and online courses, including Comparative Literature’s several-part humanities sequence: Western literature from antiquity to the 20th century and literature from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. He has published Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (University of California Press) and essays on medieval literature, the Italian trecento, and medievalism, and lectured in this country, in Europe, and in the Middle East on such subjects as the relationship between literature and philosophy, the Hebrew Bible and Western religious traditions, religious conversion, Cicero, Freud, and Emmanuel Levinas, and on distance learning. His most recent work is forthcoming in two Modern Language Association volumes, Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower and Approaches to Teaching the Canterbury Tales.