Mieke Bal is Academy Professor in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and cofounder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Among her many books are, most recently, The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People and A Mieke Bal Reader, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

"By juxtaposing Qur'anic and biblical versions of the same story, Bal asks us to consider more than one way of looking at gender, literature, art, culture, and religious imagination. Her compendious erudition and the ease with which she traverses historical periods, cultural frames, and intellectual and academic discourses are breathtaking." - Esther Fuchs, University of Arizona"

Mieke Bal is Academy Professor in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and cofounder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Among her many books are, most recently, The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People and A Mieke Bal Reader, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

"By juxtaposing Qur'anic and biblical versions of the same story, Bal asks us to consider more than one way of looking at gender, literature, art, culture, and religious imagination. Her compendious erudition and the ease with which she traverses historical periods, cultural frames, and intellectual and academic discourses are breathtaking." - Esther Fuchs, University of Arizona"