Featured Speakers

2022

Margaret Renkl is the author of Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache in From the American South, winner of the Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award For the Art of the Essay and Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, the 2020 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award and a finalist for the 2020 Southern Book Prize. A prolific writer of essays, Renkl is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

Sunny Eaton is the director of the Conviction Review Unit at the Davidson County District Attorney’s office, working to overturn wrongful convictions. An esteemed public defense attorney, Eaton has also practiced entertainment law on Music Row and is passionate about helping entrepreneurs.

T.R.C. Hutton (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, 2009) is an Associate Professor at Glenville State College and is the author of Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South, winner of the 2014 Weatherford Award from the Appalachian Studies Association. His most recent book is entitled, Bearing the Torch: A History of the University of Tennessee.

New York Times bestselling author Tom Franklin will offer two events. He teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. His novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award. His previous works include Poachers, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. His latest novel, The Tilted World, was written with his wife, esteemed poet Beth Ann Fennelly.

2014

Craig Callender As we navigate through life, we do so with an implicit model of time in mind. It deeply matters to us, yet as he’ll explain, physics has been gradually chipping away at it for a few hundred years. That physics doesn’t vindicate manifest time seemed to Einstein “a matter of painful but inevitable resignation” (as relayed by Carnap).Cognitive science, biology and philosophy all have much to offer – none of it, he submits, painful.

Thomas J. Weiler To accommodate the constancy of the speed of light, in 1915 Einstein changed our perspective on the meaning of the FOUR coordinates, time and position (x,y,z), that describe the when and where of an event. Ten years later he generalized his result to include gravity as a geometric phenomenon. I will describe how “faster-than-light travel“ and “backwards time travel,” while plagued with paradoxes, are not incompatible with Einstein’s theories.

Mark Charles What impact does your perception of time have on your ability to succeed academically in college? Does your time perception have a greater effect on how you worship God than your theology? Mark Charles, a Native American theologian and academic researcher on the Navajo perception of time will explore these questions keyed both to the subject of the Humanities Symposium and the University theme “Through the Eyes of Others.”

Rabbi Joshua Kullock Mark McEntire of Belmont’s College of Theology and Christian Ministry will engage Rabbi Kullock in a conversation about the Jewish understanding of time and the experience of living within dominant Christian cultures that mark time differently. The discussion will highlight differences between the Jewish and Christian calendars and the impact of those differences on the ways Jews and Christians live together in community.

Dr. Kai Evers Having witnessed the introduction of poison gas and airplanes during WWI, European post-war societies agreed that future warfare would be decided by gas attacks against Europe’s cities. This presentation analyzes how interwar Germany and other European societies responded to this strange new temporality of warfare. This event is sponsored through the generosity of the Max Kade Foundation.

Dr. Eva Brann The aim of this presentation is to show that time is neither being, thing or substance, nor does it operate as power, force or destiny. Moreover, the future has, so to speak, even less existence than past or present. It would be a better world if time were not accorded any dominion over it.

Dr. Robert Levine There are profound cultural differences in how people keep, use and think about time. Social psychologist Robert Levine will take us on a tour of time through the past and around the world. He’ll talk about different ways people keep time, what they consider wasted time and define as doing nothing, the curious ways time is bought and sold, differences in time perspective, and how time can be an expression of control and power.

Caridad Cumaná Time is the chronological support of any narrative text. In film, time strings together the plot and the story but time represents more than just an organizational tool; inside the story, time is also used as a metaphor of political and social events of a country and even could be used as a metaphor of economic status. On Friday, Ms. Cumaná will host a showing of Suite Habana, followed by questions.

Dr. David Lavery The long-running BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who (which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year) chronicles the cosmic, time-travelling adventures of an over one thousand-year-old Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, but perhaps the program’s greatest achievement is its imaginative contributions to the ever-evolving nature of television narratology. He will examine not only the role of time travel in Doctor Who but its ingenious use of narrative time as well.

Louise Woehrle Filmmaker Louise Woehrle presents excerpts from her documentary Stalag Luft III – One Man’s Story told by her uncle, World War II U.S. Army Air Force Bombardier Capt. Charles Woehrle, one of 10,000 prisoners of war in Stalag Luft III. His B-17 was shot down May 1943, yet “miraculously” he survived. Woehrle felt the urgency to document her uncle’s incredible story. This event is sponsored through the generosity of the Max Kade Foundation.

2013

Amy Shuman, Ohio State University

Cece Big Crow, Research Office Director, University of Denver Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health

Eduardo C. Corral, CantoMundo Fellow

Erika Berroth, Southwestern University

George Yancy, Duquesne University

Kevin Leander, Peabody College/Vanderbilt University

Robert Barsky, Vanderbilt University

2012

Keith Montesano is the author of the poetry collection Ghost Lights (Dream Horse Press, 2010). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, Third Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Blackbird, Mid- American Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his wife in New York, where he is a PhD Candidate in English and creative writing at Binghamton University.

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (forthcoming from W.W. Norton), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review Online, FIELD, Indiana Review and Southern Review. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Western Michigan University where she is a doctoral candidate and a King/Chávez/Parks Fellow. She also serves as Poetry Editor for Third Coast and Editor at Large for Loaded Bicycle.

Kent M. Weeks has served as a college administrator and taught undergraduate and graduate students at George Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, while maintaining an active law practice in Nashville, Tennessee. A Fulbright Scholar, Weeks earned a law degree from Duke University and a Ph.D. in political science from Case Western Reserve University. As legal advisor to colleges throughout the US, he focuses on legal and policy issues affecting higher education. He has written several books, published over 60 articles and papers, and currently edits Lex Collegii, a legal newsletter for colleges and universities. His writings focus on academic and student issues such as student civility, ethical behavior of faculty, plagiarism, privacy, alcohol, drug use, hook-up culture, suicide and parental rights. His book, In Search of Civility, has gained a significant audience among college faculty, administrators, and staff.

Remziya Suleyman is a native of Kurdistan who came with her family to the US in 1991 during the first Gulf War. Known for her political activism on immigration issues, interfaith organizing, and her work in the Kurdish community to raise awareness on the Kurdish genocide, she has spoken to diverse audiences on Kurdistan and its people, her own experience as a refugee and a Muslim woman, and on life in her community after September 11. Ms. Suleyman is the Policy Coordinator for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, and currently serves as the Director of Policy & Administration for the American Center for Outreach, a Tennessee-based non-partisan organization that was established to inform, educate and empower Muslims to become engaged in society by providing the assistance they need to become productive citizens.

Fred Evans is Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator for the Center of Interpretive and Qualitative Research at Duquesne University. He is the author of several books, and has published numerous articles and book chapters on continental thinkers in relation to issues concerning psychology, politics, and technology. He is currently working on a new book, provisionally entitled Citizenship and Public Art: An Essay in Political Esthetics, focusing on Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s 9/11/01 memorial, and another book on cosmopolitanism. He also worked for five years at the Lao National Orthopedic Center and other positions in Laos, under the auspices of International Voluntary Services, and taught philosophy for a year at La Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia.

Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Professor of Law at Yale and the author of seven acclaimed books of nonfiction, including this year’s First Year Seminar common book, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy. He has also published five novels, dozens of articles in law reviews, and many op-ed columns in the nation’s leading newspapers, and appears frequently on radio and television.

2011

Rafia Zakaria is a Belmont alum, a columnist for DAWN (Pakistan’s largest English newspaper), the Director for Amnesty International USA and the author of the forthcoming book Silence in Karachi.

Dr. Rebecca Dixon Department of English, Tennessee State University

Dr. Kirsten Nigro Chair, Department of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Texas at El Paso

Dr. Maya Angelou is one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time. Hailed as a global renaissance woman, Dr. Angelou is a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist.

Nancy Mairs is a poet and an essayist, she was awarded the 1984 Western States Book Award in poetry for In All the Rooms of the Yellow House (Confluence Press, 1984) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1991. The Arizona Humanities Council gave her their 2008 Literary Treasure Award. Her first work of nonfiction, a collection of essays entitled Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 1986. Since then, she has written a memoir, Remembering the Bone House, a spiritual autobiography, Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal, and three more books of essays, Carnal Acts, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled. These are available from Beacon Press, as are her most recent books, A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories, which was supported by a fellowship from the Project on Death in America of the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute, and A Dynamic God.

2010

Margaret Atwood is a giant of modern literature who has anticipated, explored, satirized—and even changed—the popular preoccupations of our time. The Booker Prize-winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, Atwood is the rare writer whose work is adored by the public, acclaimed by the critics, and studied on university campuses around the world. Though her subject matter varies, the precision crafting of her language—she is also a renowned poet—gives her body of work a sensibility entirely its own.

Based in Toronto, Atwood has written over forty classic books which have been translated into over thirty languages. Her novels include Alias Grace, Life Before Man, Oryx and Crake and 2009’s The Year of the Flood. Her major awards include The Giller and The Governor General’s Award (Canada), The Booker Prize (UK), The Dashiell Hammett Award (United States), and the Le Chevalier dans l’Ordre de Arts et Les Lettres (France).

Dr. Ron Cooper is Professor of Humanities at the College of Central Florida. He believes that the imaginative worlds created in fiction can be excellent vehicles for exploration of philosophical issues. In particular, fictional characters can exemplify philosophical concepts while struggling to transform thought into action and to establish their own sense of identity. To do this well, one element is essential: humor. Cooper will discuss a number of philosophical novels and will read from his own Hume’s Fork, which was called by philosopher-novelist Rebecca Goldstein a “mix of zaniness and erudition, satire and insight . . . as delicious as it is original,” and his new novel Purple Jesus. A book signing will follow his presentation.

Dr. Nicolas Shumway is the author of The Invention of Argentina. He is an expert in Latin-American history and culture, ideologies of Hispanism, Latin-American writers, and studies in Spanish-American literature. His highly acclaimed history of Argentina considers how the “guiding fictions” of Argentina’s national heroes, politicians, theoreticians, and poets are ultimately responsible for the identity of Argentina.

Dr. Fred Gardaphe is Distinguished Professor of English and Italian American Studies at Queens College/CUNY and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. From 1998-2008 he directed the American and Italian/American Studies Programs at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is Associate Editor of Fra Noi, an Italian American monthly newspaper, editor of the Series in Italian American Studies at State University of New York Press, and co-founding-co-editor of Voices in Italian Americana, a literary journal and cultural review. He is past president of the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) (2003-2006) and the American Italian Historical Association (1996-2000), and is currently the president of the Working Class Studies Association. His edited books include New Chicago Stories, Italian American Ways, and From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana. His most recent books are From Wiseguys to Wise Men: Masculinities and the Italian American Gangster and The Art of Reading Italian Americana.

2009

Deborah Janson is an associate professor of German in West Virginia University's Department of Foreign Languages. She has published articles on works from the German Enlightenment and Romantic periods and on German literature from an eco-feminist perspective.

Adrienne Young is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter, Belmont alumna, and ardent supporter of sustainable agriculture. She bundled seed packets into the liner notes of her Grammy-nominated first album Plow to the End of the Row (2003).

John Tallmadge has dedicated his career to writing and teaching about the environment, pedagogy, and sustainability. He is the author of three books The Cincinnati Arch, Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher's Path, and Reading under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism.

Peter Hershock, from The East-West Center, is Coordinator of the Asian Studies Development Program. His primary scholarly interests lie in investigating the philosophical implications of Buddhist practice, especially the Chan tradition, and on making use of Buddhist conceptual resources to address contemporary issues.

Janisse Ray is a writer, naturalist, and activist as well as author of three books of literary nonfiction. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (2000), a memoir about growing up in a junk yard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of the Southeast, was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book.

Mary Oliver is the celebrated author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose. With her lyrical connection to the natural world, Oliver's poetry has firmly established her in the highest realm of American poets. Oliver has been honored with the National Book Award for Poetry, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, among others.

Abigail Jahiel, Illinois Wesleyan University, is Director of Environmental Studies and Associate Professor of Environmental and International Studies. A political scientist and China specialist by training, Dr. Jahiel has published articles on environmental issues in China in such journals as The China Quarterly, China Rights Forum, and Environmental Politics.

Dr. Judith Shapiro is the Director of the Global Environmental Politics Programs at American University. Her current research is in the political and social dynamics of environmental degradation and sustainable development in China. Her latest book is Mao's War against the Environment: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China.

Kavita Philip is Director of the Critical Theory Institute and Associate Professor of Women's Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources and Modernity in Colonial South India; author and editor of Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience; and co-editor of Homeland Securities, Multiple Contentions, and Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization.

2008

Freddie O’Connell is a radio talk show host who hosts Liberadio, a political show on Vanderbilt University’s WRVU.

Dr. Daniel Frick is Director of the Writing Center and adjunct professor of English at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and the author of Reinventing Richard Nixon: The Cultural History of an American Obsession.

Dr. Masood Raja is a Belmont alumnus who teaches in the English department at Kent State, and he specializes in Postcolonial Literature and Theory.

Michael Bérubé is the author of six books to date, his most recent being What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education (W. W. Norton, 2006) and Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). He is also the editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies and, with Cary Nelson, of Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities.

2007

Molly Miller is a Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University. She has made numerous Antarctic trips for research, and her work has focused on evidence of ancient life in the Transantarctic Mountains.

Stefanie Ohnesorg is an Associate Professor of German at the University of Tennessee.

Alexa Smith is a freelance journalist and Presbyterian minister who for 15 years covered international conflicts through the lens of religious communities trapped within them.

Tony D'Souza is a journalist, author of Whiteman, and a recipient of the Best First Fiction Prize from the American Academy of Ms and Letters.

Brice Minnigh is a Belmont Alumnus and a freelance travel journalist. He is a former editor of The Belmont Vision and a former reporter for the Tennessean/ Nashville Banner.

Margaret Doody is a renowned critic, a novelist, and holder of the endowed John and Barbara Glynn Family Professorship of Literature at the University of Notre Dame.

2006

Alicita Rodriguez is a fiction writer and a creative writing professor at Western State College in Gunnison,Colorado. She is also the fiction editor for the literary journal Marginalia.

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her most recent publications include The Annotated Brothers Grimm, the Norton Critical Edition of The Classic Fairy Tales, and The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales.

Jim Davidheiser is Professor and Chair of the German Department at the University of the South and is the founder of his university’s German House.

Holly Tucker is an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University. She is author of a recent article on fairy tales, “Fairies, Midwives, and Birth Spaces in the Tales of Mme d’Aulnoy” in Classical Unities: Place, Time, Action.

2005

Ellen Cohn is Editor of the papers of Benjamin Franklin at Yale University and is the author of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Yale University Press).

Amy Sturgis holds a Ph.D. in Intellectual History and specializes in the fields of Science Fiction/Fantasy, the Gothic, and Indigenous American Studies. She teaches a range of related classes for Belmont’s University College.

Carla Mulford is a Professor of English at Penn State University whose work addresses early modern studies, American studies before 1900, and contemporary Native studies. She has published widely on colonial America, often focusing on Benjamin Franklin. Her most recent book studies include Early American Writings (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Finding Colonial Americas: Essays Honoring J.A. Leo Lemay (University of Delaware Press, 2001).

Lester Olson is a Professor in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburg. His interests include colonial America and visual rhetoric, and his most recent books are Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991) and Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of American Community: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (University of South Carolina Press, 2004).

2004

Eva Hoffman is a writer and academic, former editor and writer at The New York Times, and author of numerous texts, including Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989), Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993), Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997), The Secret: A Novel (2002), and After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004).

Roger Ames is Editor of Philosophy East and West since 1987, author of a new translation of the Tao te Ching, and was Director of the Center for Chinese Studies from 1991 until Spring 2000.

Amittai Aviram is a former professor of English and comparative literature at the University of South Carolina who, after twenty years teaching, is returning to Columbia University to study computer science and the problem of why we cannot make good translation machines.

2003

Susan Kuner is a Belmont alumna and lead author of Speak the Language of Healing as well as other works that explore the ethical and political implications of storytelling.

Sarah Sloane is a professor at Colorado State University and a rhetoric & composition specialist whose work examines online storytelling.

Murutamanga Kabahita is a French teacher at The Potomac School as well as founder and president of Projet Lycee Amani.

Judy Doenges is a creative writing professor at Colorado State University and author of the forthcoming novel, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.

2002

Margaret Anne Doody is a literary scholar, the Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at Notre Dame, and author of Aristotle Detective and Aristotle and Poetic Justice.

Sharan Newman is a medieval historian, author of the acclaimed Catherine LeVendeur series, and winner of the Macavity Award for the best new mystery of 1993.