About this Series

The Penn State University Press announces a partnership with the Institute for Signifying Scriptures to publish Signifying (on) Scriptures, a book series edited by Vincent L. Wimbush. This series invites and challenges scholars from a wide range of fields and disciplines to engage the phenomenon of signifying in relation to the complex notion of “scriptures.” Moving away from traditional scriptural exegesis, this series embraces the mission of the Institute to look at world traditions, cultures, and their scriptures through a critical and self-reflexive social-cultural lens. We invite authors to consider and interpret how peoples—particularly, but not exclusively, the historically dominated—construct, communicate, and interpret meanings about themselves and the world. This call will foster multidisciplinary, comparative, and sociopolitically engaged thinking, research, and writing about scriptures—what they are, how they were invented, what we make them do for us, how they are represented, and their effects on global society and culture, both today and throughout history. Such explorations will help to broaden the exciting and expanding discourse on how scriptures and the meanings that emerge out of cultural or individual “signification” on scriptures become vectors for understanding, establishing, communicating, sometimes undermining, sometimes securing identities, positions, agency, and power in the world.

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