2025 - Neighbors

Featured Speakers

Khalil Ekulona has experience in multiple forms of broadcasting, working in television with New Mexico PBS and KOB4 TV. In 2019 he moved to public radio working with KUNM, the NPR affiliate in Albuquerque. In 2021 he moved to Nashville to be the inaugural host of This Is Nashville for WPLN. After 3 years, over 250 shows, and thousands of guests he stepped down to pursue other pathways. His mantra “Be Good To Each Other” holds true for all people, everywhere.

Tom Junod is senior writer for ESPN, where his work has won an Emmy and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sports writing. He is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a winner of the James Beard Award for essay writing. For Esquire’s 75th Anniversary, the editors of the magazine selected his 9/11 story “The Falling Man” as one of the seven top stories in Esquire’s history. In 2019, his story on beloved children’s TV host Fred Rogers, “Can You Say…Hero?,” served as the basis for the movie “A Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood,” starring Tom Hanks and Matthew Rhys. His memoir, “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man” will be published by Doubleday this March 2026.

Dr. Eric Calderwood is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is also the Director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2011. His first book, Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture, was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2018. It has been translated into Arabic and Spanish and has won several awards, including the 2019 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies. His second book, On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus, was published by Harvard University Press in 2023. It was a finalist for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2024 and received honorable mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association. Calderwood’s current book project, tentatively titled “Babel’s Bounty,” explores the politics and aesthetics of multilingual creativity and artistry in the western Mediterranean world, from the medieval period to the present. In addition to his scholarship, Calderwood has contributed essays and commentary to public-facing venues like Foreign Policy, McSweeney’s, the afikra Podcast, NPR, and the BBC.

Dr. C.J. Sentell, born on a nut farm in Louisiana, C.J. has lived in Nashville for nearly 20 years. In 2009 he began farming in Joelton as the experimental apparatus to his dissertation on the relationship between freedom and food, slavery and agriculture. At Ecotone Farm he raised organic eggs and poultry, pastured pork and grass-fed beef and lamb, all animal welfare approved and marketed farm-to-fork. From 2009-14, C.J. served on the Board of Directors for the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group and later helped develop the Strategic Vision of the Agrarian Trust with the Schumacher Center for New Economics. Prior to coming to TNFP, C.J. Served as the Executive Director of Forge, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) in Arkansas, where he helped underserved farmers and entrepreneurs access capital and technical assistance to start and run successful small businesses. Before that, C.J. served as the Curriculum Director for Brightwater: a center for the study of food - the first culinary school in the country based on a food systems approach - and helped found the Grass Roots Farmers' Cooperative. An Alumnus of Hendrix College, C.J. holds a master's degree from Cambridge University and a doctorate from Vanderbilt University. In addition to taking care of his beloved herd of cattle, C.J. enjoys spending time with his wife and three children.

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

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