The online home for the Humanities Forum at The University of Scranton through the Gail and Francis Slattery Center for Humanities

Tag: Forum (Page 1 of 2)

Jennifer Frey, Iris Murdoch and Flannery O’Connor on Vision, Transcendence, and Morality, March 12

On March 12, University of South Carolina professor Jennifer Frey will deliver a talk entitled “Iris Murdoch and Flannery O’Connor on Vision, Transcendence, and Morality” at 5:30pm in the Heritage Room, 5th floor of Weinberg Memorial Library.

Dr. Frey is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, working at the intersection of the philosophy of action and ethics. She was recently a PI of a three year, 2.1 million dollar research project titled, “Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning of Life.” She is the author of many articles and recently co-edited a book titled, Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology. She runs a popular philosophy podcast, “Sacred and Profane Love.”

John Fletcher, “Real Trouble: Performing Irony and Identity in a Deepfake World,” 2/19

On Wednesday, February 19 at 5:30pm in Pearn Auditorum (BRN 228), Dr. John Fletcher will kick off the Spring 2020 Humanities Forum with his talk “Real Trouble: Performing Irony and Identity in a Deepfake World.”

Deepfakes have become a part of our contemporary lives. These algorithmically-generated manipulations of images and videos have been profiled by Reset, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and recently in The Atlantic as ways that disinformation and misinformation proliferates online.

John Fletcher is the Billy J. Harbin Associate Professor of Theatre at Louisiana State University. He studies social change performance, evangelical Christianity, and online disinformation/misinformation. His work appears in journals such as Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Theatre Survey, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Performance Matters as well as in anthologies such as Theatre, Performance, and Change (Palgrave 2018), Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (Palgrave 2017), and Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions (Michigan 2010). His monograph Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age was published in 2013 by Michigan. He serves as the co-editor of Theatre Topics. Current research projects involve investigating the endpoints of activist performance and theorizing irony/mendacity in online performance.

We hope you will join us for Dr. Fletcher’s talk.

Lisa Dolasinski, In between Ethnic Heritage and Italian Identity: The Rise of Hip- Hop in Mainstream Italy, November 7

On Thursday, November 7, we are proud to bring Italian scholar Lisa Dolasinski to campus to discuss ethnicity in contemporary Italian culture. Looking through the lens of hip hop, Dolasinski investigates the richness and unique expression of Italian musical artists and Italian culture. We hope you will join us at 7:30 in Brennan 228 for what should be an enlightening and entertaining talk.

Susan Antebi, “Disability in the Archive: Hygiene, History, and Intercorporeality,” October 2

This Wednesday, October 2 at 5:30 in Pern Auditorium (BRN 228) the Humanities Forum continues with Dr. Susan Antebi. Dr. Antebi’s talk, “Disability in the Archive: Hygiene, History, and Intercorporeality” will focus on the idea of disability and as a way of being in the world, rather than a limiting set of ideas.

A professor at the University of Toronto, Dr. Antebi teaches contemporary and twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture and her current research focuses on disability and corporeality in the contexts of Mexican cultural production. She is the author of Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability, (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009). Her work in the area of disability studies stems from a long-standing interest in concepts and experiences of corporeal difference, particularly as tied to the history of ethnographic spectacle, and to the ethics of embodied identity in literature and performance.

Dr. Antebi’s talk will focus on how notions of disability regularly refer to limitations in a subject’s participation in the world. Yet disability studies scholars and activists have reframed the concept of disability in a variety of ways, focusing for example on collective or fluid subjects, or on disability as a material and social process of becoming rather than a determined condition. In her reading of disability as archival encounter, Dr. Antebi investigates the ways in which disability emerges in relation to distinct temporal frameworks, particularly in the first decades of twentieth-century Mexico. The present-day encounter with archival materials of disability in history is conceived as an embodied experience, necessarily tied to twenty-first century notions of disability and to the fraught horizons of cause and effect that still appear to shape the body’s origins and becomings.

Announcing the Fall 2019 Humanities Forum!

We are pleased to announce the lineup for this semester’s Humanities Forum. Featuring an award-winning author, acclaimed researcher in disability studies, noted scholar of masculinity and migration in Italy, as well as a major contributor to the world of modern philosophy, this semester’s forum will enliven The University of Scranton campus through lively discussion and debate.

Building upon last years wildly-successful Humanities Forum, this year’s offerings will feature 8 events curated by faculty members for the students, staff, and faculty at The University of Scranton. The Humanities Forum is a place where the campus and greater Scranton community can come together to engage with important topics brought to campus from speakers from across the humanistic disciplines.

We look forward to seeing you at our events. All events are free and open to the public.

Tonight! Brian Conniff on Bruce Springsteen and the Catholic Imagination

Tonight, CAS Dean Brian Conniff will be speaking on the enduring connection between legendary American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen and seminal modernist writer Flannery O’Connor at 5:30 pm in LSC 133.

Brian Conniff has been the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences since 2010. Previously, he served as dean of the College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences at Radford University in Radford, Va. Prior to that, he served as a professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio.

Dr. Conniff’s academic areas of expertise and research are lyric and modern poetry and prison writing. His book “The Lyric of Modern Poetry: Olson, Creeley, Bunting” was published in 1988 and his book entitled “Before the Law: Race, Violence and Morality in Contemporary American Prison Writing” is currently under consideration for publication.

Dr. Conniff has published more than two dozen articles in academic books and scholarly journals including, most recently “John Tracy Ellis and the Figure of the Catholic Intellectual” in Catholic Education; “Answering ‘The Waste Land:’ Robert Hayden and the Rise of African American Poetic Sequence” in The African American Review; and “Live from Death Row as Post-legal Prison Writing” in Literature and Law. He frequently writes book reviews for Religious Studies Review and Christianity and Literature.

During his career, he received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ohio Humanities Council, the Forum on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition Today and Campus Compact among others.

Dr. Conniff earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Rutgers University and his master’s degree in English literature from The University of Scranton. He earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Notre Dame.

Today! Catherine Cornille on Interreligious Empathy at 7pm in Brennan 228

Tonight at 7pm, Catherine Cornille will be presenting on interreligious empathy and dialogue at 7pm in Brennan 228.

Catherine Cornille is the Newton College Alumnae Chair of Western Culture and professor of comparative theology at Boston College. From 2008-2013, she organized the Boston College Symposia on Interreligious Dialogue, bringing together scholars from different religions and various parts of the world to focus on fundamental questions in Interreligious Dialogue. Her research interests include the Theology of Religions and concrete questions in the Hindu-Christian and Buddhist-Christian dialogues. She is the author of The Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue, the founding and managing editor of the book series Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Sacred Texts, and the editor of The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue. She holds a licentiate in theology, a B.A. in Philosophy, and a Ph.D in Religious Studies from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), as well as an M.A. in Asian Religions from the University of Hawaii.

« Older posts