The Providence College Humanities Forum FA2023

Martin Robinson is an advocate for the great tradition of liberal arts education. He is a former theatre and English teacher, working for over twenty years in London state schools. He was a member of senior leadership teams, and an advanced skills teacher.

Through his consultancy work he works closely with a variety of schools on curriculum design and delivers keynote lectures on curriculum, culture, and creating. As a professor he leads policy and research on curriculum and assessment for Academica University.

A regular on the conference circuit both in the U.K. and internationally, Martin’s talks are challenging, entertaining, and sure to get people talking and reflecting on their practice.

Zena Hitz is a tutor at St John’s College and the author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Her book explores the meaning and the value of learning for its own sake, through images and stories of bookworms, philosophers, scientists, and other learners, both fictional and historical. She spent three years living and working in the Madonna House Apostolate and has taught in prison programs and to other non-traditional students. When she is not teaching or speaking she spends time thinking about topics like the moral decline and fall of individuals and communities, as depicted in stories from Genesis to The Godfather.

R. Shep Melnick is the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and co-chair of the Harvard Program on Constitutional Government. He is author of Regulation and the Courts: The Case of the Clean Air Act (Brookings, 1984), Between the Lines:  Interpreting Welfare Rights (Brookings, 1994), The Transformation of Title IX:  Regulating Gender Equality in Education (Brookings, 2018), and most recently The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Equal Educational Opportunity (University of Chicago Press,2023. He has served as president of the New England Political Science Association and an elected member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. He received both his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard.

Sarah O’Dell is an M.D.-Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine, where she is the first to complete a Ph.D. in English within a dual M.D.-Ph.D. program. As a future physician-scholar and psychiatrist, she is passionate about how the activity of the imagination — as shaped by literature, faith, and the arts — helps to heal the mind. Reflecting this core interest, her dissertation research presents the first combined study of the early gothic novel, religious studies, and the history of psychiatry. She is also an active C.S. Lewis and Inklings scholar, with a particular focus on Lewis’s friend, physician, and fellow Inkling R.E. Havard. Her current book project — The Medical Inkling — explores Havard’s roles as a physician, Inkling, and Catholic writer, as well as reveals how his medical imagination influenced C.S. Lewis. Her research has previously appeared in Mythlore, VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center, and the Journal of Medical Humanities. She is a recent Harvey Fellow as well as a recipient of the 2023 Andrew Vincent White and Florence Wales White Graduate Student Scholarship.

Naomi Weiss is professor of classics at Harvard University, where she has been teaching since 2014. She received her B.A. and master’s from the University of Oxford and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Much of her research has centered on the performance of archaic and classical Greek poetry, especially tragedy. Her first book, The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Tragedy was published by the University of California Press in 2018. She has co-edited two volumes: Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (Brill 2019) and Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds (Cambridge University Press 2021). Her second monograph, which has just been published, bears the same title as her talk: Seeing Theater: The Phenomenology of Ancient Greek Drama (University of California Press 2023).

L. S. Dugdale, M.D., MAR, is professor of medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. She also serves as co-director of clinical ethics at Columbia’s NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. A practicing internist, her scholarship focuses on end-of-life issues, the role of aesthetics in teaching ethics, moral injury, and the doctor-patient relationship. She edited Dying in the Twenty-First Century (MIT Press, 2015) and is author of The Lost Art of Dying (HarperOne, 2020), a popular press book on the preparation for death. Dugdale attended medical school at the University of Chicago, completed residency training at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and holds a MAR in ethics from Yale Divinity School.

Dennis C. Rasmussen is professor of political science and the Hagerty Family Fellow at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. His research focuses on the Enlightenment, the American founding, and the virtues and shortcomings of liberal democracy and market capitalism. He is the author of five books, including The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought, which was shortlisted for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award; Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders, which was named a best politics book of the year in the Wall Street Journal; and, most recently, The Constitution’s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America’s Basic Charter.

David Embrick is Associate Professor in Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is also director of Research on Resilient Cities, Racism, and Equity at UConn and coeditor of the recent book, Protecting Whiteness: Whitelash and the Rejection of Racial Equality.

Coleman Hughes is a writer whose work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman, and his forthcoming book is entitled The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.

Carter Snead is one of the world’s leading experts on public bioethics – the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology in the name of ethical goods. His research explores issues relating to neuroethics, enhancement, human embryo research, assisted reproduction, abortion, and end-of-life decision-making.

Matthew Rose is senior fellow and director of the Barry Center on the University and Intellectual Life. A scholar of religion, Matthew was previously executive director of the Berkeley Institute and Ennis Fellow in Humanities at Villanova University, where he taught courses in philosophy, politics, and literature. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago after receiving his M.A. from the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of A World After Liberalism (Yale, 2021) and Ethics with Barth (Ashgate, 2010), as well as of articles in Political Theology, The Thomist, Logos, Pro Ecclesia, Studies in Christian Ethics, Journal of Catholic Moral Theology, First Things, National Affairs, Public Discourse, and The Weekly Standard.