Prof. Gregory Erickson will talk about his book, which narrates reading 2,000 years of Christian heresy through the works of James Joyce. Through passages in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, we will move from the ancient Gnostics to Reformation iconoclasm to Book of Mormon to Joyce celebrations on the streets of New York City and Antwerp.
Gregory Erickson is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at New York University’s Gallatin School, where he teaches courses on modern literature, James Joyce, popular culture, and religion. He is the author of The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), the co-author, with Richard Santana, of Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred (McFarland, 2008; 2016), and the co-editor of the collection Reading Heresy: Religion and Dissent in Literature and Art (De Gruyter 2017). His two most recent books are Christian Heresy, James Joyce and the Modernist Literary Imagination (Bloomsbury 2022) and Speculative Television and the Doing and Undoing of Religion (Routledge 2022). He is a founding member and former president of the International Society for Heresy Studies. He is also a part time professional trombone player.