2024 - Babel Origins & Ends of Language

Featured Speakers

Keith Kahn-Harris, Ph.D., is a sociologist and writer, based in London. He is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College and a senior research fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. The author or co-author of eight books, editor of several collections and many articles and reviews, his career bridges academia and multiple other worlds. His work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, New Humanist, Prospect, Haaretz, The Forward, New Statesman and more. His most recent books are The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language (Icon) and What Does A Jew Look Like? (in collaboration with Rob Stothard)

Sebastian Rand, Ph.D. (Northwestern University, 2006), is an expert in German Idealism, particularly Hegel, and is an affiliate faculty member at the Jean Beer Blumenfeld Center for Ethics. His research focuses on how German Idealists, especially Hegel, understood the goals and methods of the natural sciences, particularly mathematical physics and, more recently, biology. His work explores the distinction and integration of naturalness and normativity, a theme he also examines in contemporary Continental philosophy.

Emmy Pérez graduated from Columbia University (MFA) and the University of Southern California (BA). Pérez received a 2022 United States Artist Fellowship and has been honored with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets Laureate Fellowship, and others. She is a professor and department chair at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she teaches in the creative writing MFA and undergraduate programs. Pérez has also co-founded Poets Against Walls and actively mentors students while engaging in community-based writing programs.

Viktorija Bilić, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Chair of Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the University of Heidelberg, specializing in German, English, Spanish, and Croatian. She teaches workshops in German-English translation, literary translation, and computer-assisted tools. Her research focuses on historical translation and pedagogy. In the past five years, she has published two books, four articles, and presented at over two dozen national and international conferences.

Ekaputra Tupamahu, Ph.D., is an associate professor of New Testament at Portland Seminary and George Fox University, earning his PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2019. His research focuses on the politics of language, race theory, postcolonial studies, and global Christianity, particularly the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement. Oxford University Press published his 2022 book Contesting Languages, and his work has appeared in various scholarly journals. Tupamahu has received several fellowships and serves on committees within the Society of Biblical Literature.

For the full history of the featured speakers of the Belmont University Humanities Symposium, click here.

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