{"id":17886,"date":"2022-04-22T18:01:56","date_gmt":"2022-04-22T18:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=17886"},"modified":"2026-02-27T22:41:29","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T22:41:29","slug":"shelf-conscious-susanna-drake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2022\/04\/shelf-conscious-susanna-drake\/","title":{"rendered":"Shelf Conscious: Susanna Drake"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Talia Bank ’23<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Religious studies professor Susanna Drake teaches courses in the history of Christianity, biblical studies, and women\u2019s, gender, and sexuality studies.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any standout books you\u2019ve read recently?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the Light We Cannot See<\/em>, by Anthony Doerr. It\u2019s set during World War II on a tiny walled island, and one of the main characters is blind. The descriptions of her making her way around through touch and sound\u2014that\u2019s fascinating to me. I remember being at the beach and trying to hide from my family so that I could have more time to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s one of your all-time favorite reads?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could read Michael Ondaatje\u2019s In The Skin of a Lion<\/em> and The <\/em>English Patient<\/em> over and over again. Another favorite is Henry James\u2019s The Wings of the Dove<\/em>. I\u2019m one of those people who likes a hundred pages of describing a setting or feeling with little dialogue; that\u2019s totally relaxing to me to read. I love when authors evoke a certain emotion that you haven\u2019t thought much about because it\u2019s so hard to describe. I love being put in that place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What book is crucial to understanding your academic niche?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My field is early Christian history, but a really important book to me is Saba Mahmood\u2019s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and <\/em>the Feminist Subject<\/em>. She conducted an ethnography among Muslim women in women\u2019s piety groups in Cairo, Egypt\u2014women who are living into the norms. She encourages us to think more broadly about what agency means, and that it\u2019s not always resistance to an oppressive norm. That\u2019s been important to me in the study of religion and for my current research project on women\u2019s veiling practices, where I\u2019m thinking about the ways that women relate to their practices of piety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s something you love to read that we might not expect?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t read anything serious before I go to bed, so I love to read cookbooks. I\u2019ve read many more recipes than I\u2019ve ever cooked, but I\u2019m starting to cook them. And I love looking at pictures in interior design magazines\u2014it\u2019s like a visual feast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What one book would you recommend to everyone at Macalester?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Augustine\u2019s Confessions<\/em> is so much more than an autobiography or memoir; it\u2019s a meditation. It\u2019s one of those books that I read at age twenty and got one thing out of it, and then read again as I\u2019m getting older and get something else. What he says about memory, time, love\u2014it\u2019s just a good book to wrestle with and learn from.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever wonder about all those books lining professors’ offices? We’re with you.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":17907,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17886"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30789,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17886\/revisions\/30789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}