Justin’s current research explores how to characterize the image-text relationships between the visual cultures of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean and biblical literature, including texts of the Hebrew Bible as well as other Second Temple literature, such as evidenced in the Dead Sea Scrolls and even the New Testament. More broadly he is interested in the ways in which discussion of the image-text relationships evinced in the Hebrew Bible can contribute to interdisciplinary discussions of image-text relationships in... moreJustin’s current research explores how to characterize the image-text relationships between the visual cultures of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean and biblical literature, including texts of the Hebrew Bible as well as other Second Temple literature, such as evidenced in the Dead Sea Scrolls and even the New Testament. More broadly he is interested in the ways in which discussion of the image-text relationships evinced in the Hebrew Bible can contribute to interdisciplinary discussions of image-text relationships in antiquity. Justin has secondary research interests in ancient Israelite religion in its Near Eastern context, ancient Near Eastern art history, and the philosophy of images.
In his dissertation “Ekphrasis and the Poetics of Visuality in Ancient Israel” Justin makes use of ekphrastic texts in the Hebrew Bible as loci for the text-image dialogic that took place in ancient Israel. He argues that the poetics of ekphrasis that play out in ekphrastic texts in the Hebrew Bible offer ancient commentary on the characteristics, function, and ontology of images. These poetics, however, must be interpreted in light of their literary and ideological contexts. These texts thus require not only a thorough exposition of the potentialities of ekphrasis as a genre in comparative literary perspective, but also a sophisticated knowledge of and interaction with the literary and ideological features of the various biblical texts in which they are found. Each chapter thus contains focused ruminations on the poetic function of ekphrasis in particular passages, ruminations that are grounded in the history of scholarship on those particular texts.edit
Joel S. Baden, John J. Collins, Hindy Najman, Zainab Bahrani, Robert R. Wilsonedit
