The Providence College Humanities Forum Spring 2026

George Corbett is Professor of Theology and Director of Research, School of Divinity, University of St Andrews. He has two principal areas of research and teaching: Theology and the Arts (with specialisms in Dante studies, sacred music, and theological aesthetics) and Systematic and Historical Theology (with specialisms in medieval theology, Aquinas’s theology, and Catholic theology). 

Michael Sullivan (PC ’88, recipient of the Personal Achievement Award from the Providence College National Alumni Association) is an attorney and international relations expert with extensive experience in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Vietnam, and along the Thai-Myanmar border. He specializes in the study of war crimes documentation and historical atrocities. Sullivan’s fieldwork focuses on equipping state and non-state armed groups with a solid understanding of humanitarian law, along with effective methods and best practices for documenting war crimes. In academia, his research, which began during his residency in Ukraine, centers on the 1919 pogroms in Ukraine and Poland, as well as the subsequent pogroms in Rivne (Rovno) and Lutsk during and after the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Sullivan teaches at American University and is a member of the law faculty at the Afghanistan Law and Political Science Association, where he supports initiatives to expand educational access for Afghan women under Taliban rule. He has received the U.S. Department of State Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards and the NATO Non‑Article 5 Medal for service in Afghanistan.

Francis Su is the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, a former president of the Mathematical Association of America, and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2013, he received the Haimo Award, a nationwide teaching prize for college math faculty. His work has been featured in Quanta Magazine, Wired, and the New York Times. His book Mathematics for Human Flourishing (2020), winner of the 2021 Euler Book Prize, offers an inclusive vision of what math is, who it’s for, and why anyone should learn it.

Sr. Maria Frassati Jakupcak is a member of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist and an Assistant Professor of English and Core Fellow at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. She got her MA and PhD at the Catholic University of America where she wrote on player-dramatists present in William Shakespeare’s plays.  She has published articles on Tolkien, Belloc, and Rumer Godden. Her writing regularly appears in Magnificat and at Deep Down Things. 

Dr Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He has published widely on medieval literature and the English language. He has lectured to a variety of audiences on C.S. Lewis, has published articles on Lewis’s scholarly writings and is the author of C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing 2024).

Abraham Nussbaum is a physician at Denver Health, a major safety-net hospital, where he cares for patients hospitalized with acute mental health crises and serves as Chief Education Officer, overseeing the training of 1,800 students and 1,200 residents each year. He is also a Professor of Psychiatry and Assistant Dean of Graduate Medical Education at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where he teaches the basic sciences underlying psychiatry to first-year medical students.

Nussbaum studied medicine, psychiatry, social medicine, and theology at the University of North Carolina and Duke University. His writing has appeared in America, Commonweal, Psychiatric News, Plough, STAT, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Times Higher Education.

Mónica Guzmán is a bridge builder, journalist, and author who lives for great conversations sparked by curious questions. Her best-selling book, “I Never Thought of it That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times,” has been featured in The New York Times, The Glenn Beck Podcast, and Reader’s Digest, and was named one of the 10 best books to read before college by U.S. News.

Mónica is founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity, where she works to build a world that sees itself, and advisor for Braver Angels, the nation’s largest cross-partisan grassroots organization working to depolarize America. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Viewpoints Project, a nonprofit dedicated to improving capacity for curious approaches to disagreement in educational settings, and is host of “A Braver Way”, a podcast that in the run-up to the 2025 election equipped people with the tools they need to bridge the political divide in their everyday lives.

Mónica received an honorary doctorate degree from Wheaton College and completed study and research fellowships at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, where she researched how journalists can rethink their roles to better meet the needs of a participatory public, the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, where she studied social and political division, and the University of Florida, where she joined forces with researchers testing techniques to boost understanding across differences.

A Mexican immigrant, Latina, and dual US/Mexico citizen, she lives in Seattle with her husband and two kids, plays a barbarian named Shadrack in her besties’ Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and is the proud liberal daughter of conservative parents.

William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges, high schools, and other venues, and the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller Excellent Sheep and, most recently, The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society. His current project is a historically situated memoir about being Jewish in modernity.

Bill has published over 300 essays and reviews. His work, which has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, and many other publications, has been translated into 19 languages and included in over 40 college readers and other anthologies. He taught English at Yale before becoming a full-time writer. He has held visiting positions at Bard, Scripps, and Claremont McKenna Colleges as well as at American Jewish University and the University of San Diego.

Bill is a member of the board (directorial or advisory) of The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life, a retreat and study program in Catskill, NY; Tivnu: Building Justice, which runs a Jewish service-learning gap year and other programs in Portland, OR; and the Prohuman Foundation, which promotes the ideals of individual uniqueness and shared humanity.

Alec Ryrie is a historian of Protestant Christianity in general and of religion in early modern England and Scotland in particular. He is interested in the cultural, social, political and emotional history of religion, and has written on subjects including faith and doubt; martyrdom, violence and religious warfare; magic and deception; moderation and radicalism; childhood religious experience; and liturgy and prayer, formal and informal. He is co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and (in 2019-20) president of the Ecclesiastical History Society. His books include Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019, The English Reformation: A Very Brief History (2020), and most recently The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (2025). In 2029 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He is also a licensed Reader in the Church of England.

Craig Fehrman has taught at Yale University and Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the editor of The Best Presidential Writing, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others. Fehrman is the author of Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote, which the Wall Street Journal called “one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years.” He now lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his wife, who works in publishing, and their two children. He also teaches sportswriting at Indiana University.

Paolo Carozza is Co‑Chair of the Oversight Board, the independent expert body created by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to issue binding decisions and policy recommendations on difficult content‑moderation questions. He previously served as the United States member of the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission and as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. From 2006 to 2010 he was a member, and in 2008–09 President, of the Inter‑American Commission on Human Rights. In 2016 Pope Francis appointed him an Academician of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

A member of the Notre Dame Law School faculty since 1996, Carozza is an expert in comparative constitutional law, human rights, law and development, and international law. He has directed the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Law School’s Center for Civil and Human Rights. He is a Faculty Fellow of several Notre Dame institutes and clinics, including the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights and the Notre Dame Global Human Rights Clinic. Carozza holds an AB from Harvard University and a JD from Harvard Law School, where he was also a Ford Foundation Fellow. After law school he clerked for the Supreme Court of the Federated States of Micronesia and practiced at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C..