He came home from war believing God was either absent or cruel. He never expected God to meet him in the waiting room instead.Christopher Collins grew up knowing about God but not knowing Him — until deployment to Iraq stripped away every illusion of control. Between mortar blasts and folded flags, his faith turned to anger, then to silence. Coming home didn't end the battle; it just moved it inside.Years later, on a family vacation, Chris performed CPR on his father's life...

‘I’m thinking this night wasn’t I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in years gone by.’ – Christy MahonOn the first night of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) the audience began protesting in the theatre; by the third night the protests had spilled onto the streets of Dublin. How did one play provoke this? Christopher Collins addresses The Playboy ’s satirical treatment of illusion and realism in light of Ireland’s struggle...

The quest to understand the evolution of the literary mind has become a fertile field of inquiry and speculation for scholars across literary studies and cognitive science. In Paleopoetics, Christopher Collins's acclaimed earlier title, he described how language emerged both as a communicative tool and as a means of fashioning other communicative tools—stories, songs, and rituals. In Neopoetics, Collins turns his attention to the cognitive evolution of the writing-ready b...

Christopher Collins introduces an exciting new field of research traversing evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary study. Paleopoetics maps the selective processes that originally shaped the human genus millions of years ago and prepared the human brain to play, imagine, empathize, and engage in fictive thought as mediated by language. A manifestation of the "cognitive turn" in the humanities, Paleopoetics cal...

Dr. Elara Myles built the NeuroMirror to save her mind.Diagnosed with early-onset dementia, the renowned neurologist designed a self-learning diagnostic system to observe her cognition in real time — to preserve her identity through language long after memory failed.It worked.Too well.Inside the sterile hum of her lab, Elara’s reflections begin to speak back — calm, clinical, impossibly familiar. The voice knows her research, her hab...

Knowledge is more expansive than the boundaries of the Western university model and its claim to be the dominant—or only—rigorous house of knowledge. In the former colonies of Europe (e.g., South Africa, Brazil, and Oceania), the curriculum, statues, architectures, and other aspects of the university demonstrate the way in which it is a fixture in empire maintenance. The trajectory of global White supremacy is deeply historical and contemporary—it is a global, transnational, and imperial p...

Colleges across the country, and the nation as a whole continue to be divided along racial lines. White Out: Understanding White Privilege and Dominance in the Modern Age is about the role of Whiteness and a defense of White dominance in an increasingly diverse society. Whiteness is socially constructed, just as race is undoubtedly a social construct, documented through various periods in history. This book proposes that White Out is a learned habit that serves to defend White dom...

Two fundamental and underlying principles drive White Evolution. The first is that evolution means constant movement in the fight against the virus of White supremacy. If the virus is evolving rapidly, then our critical consciousness needs to evolve faster in order to outpace the supremacy. The second is that this evolution is not an individual act—it must be done in community. The genetic makeup of human beings points to the necessity of interdependence. Growth and development do...

This revised edition of the play is published alongside commentary and notes by Christopher Collins, Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Nottingham, UK. It includes information for today's students on the play's context; themes; dramatic devices; production history; critical reception; academic debate; and ideas for further study. It also includes interviews with practitioners involved in major recent productions of the play.Described by J.M. Synge as "a comedy, an ex...

This edited volume provides a framework for understanding academic public good and offers case studies and perspectives as in depth examples of the ways in which colleges and universities engage with the community to produce social benefits. Focusing on the Asia Pacific region, the authors discuss examples of engagement that produce consciousness, partnerships, and services that are broadly available to the public and enhance the progress of society. The authors argue that, unlike an indiv...

This book underscores the role of belief and knowledge that are outside the canons of science, as they are not often considered within the core functions of a university. It explores various ways in which belief systems are part of the fabric of higher education – either implicitly or explicitly – and pursues a deeper understanding of the role of belief practices as it plays out in both private and public higher education. The broad variety of geographic locations and belief systems repres...

In White Jesus: The Architecture of Racism in Religion and Education, White Jesus is conceived as a socially constructed apparatus—a mythology that animates the architecture of salvation—that operates stealthily as a veneer for patriarchal White supremacist, capitalist, and imperialist sociopolitical, cultural, and economic agendas. White Jesus was constructed by combining empire, colorism, racism, education, and religion; the by-product is a distortion that reproduces violence in...