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Research
Mark C. Eades' current work in research and writing bridges creative concerns with wide-ranging interests in the humanities and social sciences, including ideas from comparative religion and mythology, classical and medieval studies, Romanticism, psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, and contemporary world affairs, as intellectual background to present-day lived experience. As such, his writing varies in form from poetry to reportage to formal essay. Of particular current interest in his writing and research are expressions in contemporary global culture of the principle of liminality, broadly defined as the quality or state of being at the limits or edges of things, at the in-between places, neither here nor there, one thing nor the other. This focus reflects a life-long aesthetic attraction to borders, passageways, ports of entry and exit, and other features of the physical landscape that express liminality as well as an intellectual concern with those boundaries of nationality, race, religion, language, knowledge, and consciousness that demarcate the landscape of the mind and spirit. Beyond the mere observation of these boundaries, however, it is his desire to actively engage them, to negotiate their tangled reaches and see what waits on the other side. In contemporary settings around the world but with an eye also to those lingering shadows of the past that haunt the borders of the present, he sets out in his writing to journey with the reader into a liminal terra incognita of uncertainty, ambiguity, and change. His interests also in progressive politics and global activism are reflected in his weblog and publications in the alternative and mainstream press. His research and writing interests relate closely to his teaching work in the United States and abroad, including his current work teaching college humanities in the San Francisco Bay Area and previous experience teaching at the university and professional levels in Shanghai, China, as detailed in his curriculum vitae. Related international experience in addition to teaching in China includes visits with Palestinian refugees in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and visits with Southeast Asian refugees in Thailand and Hong Kong.
Mark C. Eades
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