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‘Poised on the Higher Horizon’: Seeing God in the Sahara
Full text linkThis article presents an Arabic transcription and complete English translation of an untitled text – labelled “Khalwa” in the manuscript catalogue - attributed to Sīdī al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī, a Saharan scholar and Sufi teacher of the late-eighteenth century. In the accompanying commentary, I demonstrate how this text draws together two passages in the Qur’ān: the ambiguous visionary encounters of 53:1-18 and Moses’s request to see God in 7:142-143 to argue that, unlike Moses, Muḥammad received a direct vision of God. I further argue that, for Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī, the question of seeing God was linked to his concern over legitimate and illegitimate knowledge from the realm of the unseen (ʿālam al-ghayb). Intertextual references demonstrate that Sīdī al-Mukhtār understood the friends of God to occupy the same role in the spiritual hierarchy as Muḥammad and the prophets. Read in this context, “Khalwa” suggests that the friends of God might be able to follow Muḥammad’s example, see God with their own eyes, and thus master the sciences of the unseen
Hit the Wall
No full textThis image features Roberta, going to the Stonewall Inn, wearing a giraffe print dress. When designing her costume I wanted to give her a bold print to emphasis her bold voice.https://ir.uiowa.edu/costume_design/1126/thumbnail.jp
Hit the Wall
No full textAfter the police escort bar patron out of the bar, the crowd begins to riot over a cacophony of loud music and flashing lights. The police retaliate with tear gas that overtakes the stage in a cloud.https://ir.uiowa.edu/lighting_design/1173/thumbnail.jp
Rhetoric, Dialectic, and Dogmatism: A Colloquy on Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s “Free Speech, Rhetoric, and a Free Economy”
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Talking Back: Sodomy Laws and Transgressive Subjectivity in Medieval Venice
No full textUrban Italian law, by the fifteenth-century, would become particularly aggressive in comparison to the rest of Europe not only in prosecuting sodomy, but also in implementing the threatened capital punishment. The 1354 Venetian court case of Rolandinus/a Ronchaia, in the century leading up to the officialization of the law, both exemplifies this trend and yet also stands out as unique because of the subject’s gender presentation; the case seeks to resolve whether or not this person, perceived either as ambiguously gendered or as a man dressed as a woman, can be convicted of committing sodomy or prostitution. Ronchaia, however, is consistent in her self-presentation as a woman. The courts implore Ronchaia to cease living as a woman and to recant her claims that she ever lived in such a manner; her refusal to live as male leads to her death sentence.
This paper focuses on the intersections of theoretical ideas about trans-like identity and the social realities of lived experience, of the anxieties about ambiguous gender displaced onto Ronchaia and the autonomy of Ronchaia’s life. The court’s questions focus not just on the sex acts which are allegedly the crimes, but on the details of her everyday life and previous marriage to a woman. That broader questioning points to a concern with the limits and possibilities of lived experiences of gender itself, not simply charges of prostitution or sodomy. Ronchaia’s final refusal to accept the demand to be male resists the pattern of gendered assimilation that denies individual autonomy over the body and demands a revision of the binary terms that afford or deny viable life
Light in the Piazza
No full textFeatured here is a rendering of Fabrizio in his costume during Act 2 scene 5 & 6. He is wearing a navy pinstripe suit, with a pale blue dress shirt, with a patterned tie. This is the first time that Fabrizio wears a full suit during the show. For most of the show he is dressed very casually, but as his relationship with Clara progresses, his level of dress begins to elevate.https://ir.uiowa.edu/costume_design/1234/thumbnail.jp
Understanding the Human Gut Microbiota: A Mathematical Approach
Full text linkIn order to explore the dynamics of the human gut microbiota, we used a system of ordinary differential equations to mathematically model the biomass of three microorganism populations: Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, Eubacterium rectale, and Methanobrevibacter smithii. Additionally, we modeled the concentrations of relevant nutrients necessary to sustain these populations over time. This system highlights the interactions and the competition among these species in order to further understand their dynamics. These three microorganisms were specifically chosen due to the system’s end product, butyrate, which aids in developing the intestinal barrier in the human gut. The basis of the mathematical model assumes the gut acts as a chemostat, with bacteria and nutrients exiting the gut at a rate proportional to the volume of the chemostat, the rate of volumetric flow, and the biomass or concentration of the particular population or nutrient. We performed global sensitivity analysis using Sobol’ sensitivities in order to estimate the importance of model parameters and to understand our results