James Pasto

James Pasto received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is a full-time instructor at Boston University, and an adjunct at UMass. His topical interests include the study of religion, language, and ethnicity, as well as archaeology and nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Orientalism and post-colonialism, and American-Italian studies.

His publications include "'Islam’s Strange Secret Sharer’: Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish Question,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40/3, 1998, and he gave a plenary lecturer entitled “The Tragedy of Orientalism” at the 2003 Annual Conference of International Council of Christians and Jews, Utrecht , Holland, 29th June to 2nd July, “Imagining the Other – Jews, Christians and Muslims in Modernity Between Self-determination and the Imagined Other.”

He presented a study of identity, tourism and culture change in Boston’s North End, which was published in Proceedings of the 2004 American Italian Historical Association 37th Annual Conference.