xbn .

John Modern

John Modern is a Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. Modern is the author of Secularism in Antebellum America (2011) and The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (2001). Neuromatic; or, a particular history of religion and the brain is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Modern co-curated Frequencies and co-edits Class 200: New Studies in Religion (both with Kathryn Lofton). An ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellow and former member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Modern is currently working on a long-term project that explores the end of the world through the history of Akron, OH

Essays

In the Age of Cybernetic Systems What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?

The biopolitics that Puar chronicles is not bent on elimination but rather on producing and measuring excess in order to extract value from it, in order to incorporate and use whatever remains in a project of ever-expanding control and validation of Israeli state legitimacy.

Contagions, Earthly and Otherwise

According to Burroughs and Gysin, the power of language was the thing. There was something queer, indeed, about the capacity of any language to channel all manner of patterns and directives that had nothing, essentially, to do with the words that comprised that language.