The Providence College Humanities Forum SP2024

Austin Sarat is a pioneering figure in the development of legal study in the liberal arts and of the humanistic study of law. He is the founder and former President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and the author of more than ninety books, including Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution, The Death Penalty on the Ballot: American Democracy and the Fate of Capital Punishment, and Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty. His public writing has appeared in such places as The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, and The Huffington Post.

Father Thomas Joseph White is the Rector Magnificus of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas (Angelicum) in Rome. Originally a native of southeastern Georgia in the US, Father White studied at Brown University, where he converted to Catholicism. He did his doctoral studies in theology at Oxford University, and is the author of various books and articles including Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology (Sapientia Press, 2011), The Incarnate Lord, A Thomistic Study in Christology (The Catholic University of America Press, 2015) Exodus (Brazos Press, 2016), The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (Catholic University Press, 2017), and The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God (Catholic University Press, 2022). He is co-editor of the journal Nova et Vetera, a Distinguished Scholar of the McDonald Agape Foundation, and a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Jesse Singal is cohost of the podcast Blocked and Reported, the author of the newsletter Singal-Minded and the book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, and a former editor at New York Magazine. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe and other major outlets.

John Tomasi is the inaugural President of Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit membership organization of thousands of faculty, staff, and students committed to advancing the principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement to improve higher education and academic research. Prior to joining HxA, he held the position of Romeo Elton 1843 Professor of Natural Theology at Brown University, where he founded and directed the Political Theory Project. He is the author of The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, Free Market Fairness and Liberalism Beyond Justice: Citizens, Society and the Boundaries of Political Theory—all published by Princeton University Press—as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles.

Ari Joskowicz is a historian of European Jewry and the Holocaust with a special interest in the complicated relations between different minority groups. He is the chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches on the Holocaust and the history of antisemitism. His most recent book is called Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust, which appeared this spring and won the Frankel Prize for the year’s best book in Holocaust studies.

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact and a contributing writer for The New Statesman. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at News Corp., as op-ed editor of the New York Post and as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London. In addition to those publications, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Literary Supplement, Commentary, Dissent, and The American Conservative, for which he is a contributing editor. Ahmari’s books include Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It (2023) and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos (2021), both published by Penguin Random House.

Holly Ordway is the Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute, and Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts and is a subject editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies. She is the author of the award-winning Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages, and has contributed chapters on Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Inklings to volumes such as C.S. Lewis in Poets’ Corner, The Inklings and King Arthur, and C.S. Lewis’s List. Her book Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography was released in time for the 50^th anniversary of Tolkien’s death.

Tracey Rowland is a professor in the School of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Australia). She holds doctorate degrees in theology from the University of Cambridge and the Pontifical Lateran University. She has published eight books and over one hundred and fifty articles in scientific journals and edited collections. Her work intersects the fields of political philosophy, theories of culture and theological anthropology. Her most recent book is titled Beyond Kant and Nietzsche: the Munich Defence of Christian Humanism (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). In 2012 she was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, and in 2020 she was a recipient of the Ratzinger Prize for Theology. She is a member of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and the Sovereign Military Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta.

Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, having previously been Professor of Early Modern Drama at the University of Oxford. Author or editor of twelve books and over sixty articles and chapters, she is general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (16th century), New Mermaids Plays, and Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series. Her work combines literary criticism, theatre history and book history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. She specializes in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the theatrical contexts that bring plays about. Her scholarship is widely used by theatre companies interested in historically inflected performances. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.

Allison Briscoe-Smith is a child clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma, issues of race, bridging and belonging. Dr. Briscoe-Smith earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her clinical psychology Ph.D. from University of California Berkeley. She then went on to continue her specialization in trauma and ethnic minority mental health through internship and postdoctoral work at University of California San Francisco/San Francisco General Hospital. She currently serves as the Diversity Lead of Student Life at the University of Washington, as the founder and principal of Soft River Consultation and as a Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center where she focuses on developing and implementing the science of bridging (connecting across our differences).

Jim O’Connell, MD serves as the President of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program and is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  Dr. O’Connell received his medical degree from Harvard University in 1982 and completed residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1985, he began full-time clinical work with homeless individuals as the founding physician of the program. Working with the MGH Laboratory of Computer Science, Dr. O’Connell designed and implemented the nation’s first computerized medical record for a homeless program. Dr. O’Connell served as the National Program Director of the Homeless Families Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Dr. O’Connell is the editor of The Health Care of Homeless Persons: A Manual of Communicable Diseases and Common Problems in Shelters and on the Streets. His articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Circulation, the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and several other medical journals. His first book, Stories from the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor, was published in 2015. His work at BHCHP is the subject of New York Times Best Seller, Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People by Tracy Kidder, published in 2023.