Campus Lectures, Interviews and Talks

Auschwitz survivor talks about Auschwitz, Mengele's experiments on twins, including herself and her twin sister, Miriam, and her path to forgiveness.

NPR correspondent and author of "Uncivilized Beasts and Shameless Hellions: Travels with an NPR Correspondent (2006)", John Burnett will speak from first-hand experience on the Mexican Mafias, their overlapping growth and influence on the United States illegal drug market.

Rachel Herz is a world leading expert in the sense of smell and is a professor at Brown University in the cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences.

Yochi Dreazen is a senior writer for Foreign Policy and contributing editor at The Atlantic. Dreazen has reported from more than 20 countries, including Iraq, where he served as The Wall Street Journal's main Iraq correspondent. Dreazen's current project with the Pulitzer Center focuses on Mali as the war on terror's next training ground – a topic he further explores in the recent article "The New Terrorist Training Ground" published by The Atlantic.

Nasr is a world-renown scholar on Islam and has published more than 20 books and hundreds of articles on Islamic esotericism, Islamic mysticism and metaphysics.

The Hansford M. Epes Distinguished Lecture Series is delighted to welcome University of Chicago Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence, Director of Law, Philosophy & Human Values Brian Leiter. Leiter will present "The Truth is Terrible: Nietzsche's Idea of an Aesthetic Justification for Existence."

Stephen Lewis, co-founder of the nonprofit organization AIDS-Free World, former United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDs in Africa, and former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations, will discuss "The Millennium Development Goals and Public Health Challenges."

Davidson College presents Al Young in a poetry reading as part of theLiterary Calendar series.

Prize-winning author and self-described cyborg Jillian Weise will read from her collections. Weise has two poetry collections, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex and The Book of Goodbyes (winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award) and a novel titled The Colony. Her work has appeared in Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and Love Rise Up: Poems of Social Justice, Protest and Hope. She has been awarded fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Fulbright Program; she holds degrees from Florida State, UNC-Greensboro and the University of Cincinnati, and teaches at Clemson University. She identifies as a cyborg.

Daron Acemoglu, Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will deliver the annual Cornelson Distinguished Lecture in Economics. Acemoglu won the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005 as best economist under age 40, and has been named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s “100 Global Thinkers for 2012.” He is co-author of the bestseller, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. The book explores why some nations prosper and others fail, and concludes that man-made political and economic institutions underlie economic success.

To celebrate National Poetry Month, Davidson students, faculty members and local Davidson poets will be reading from their own poetry, followed by a reception and a chance to chat with the poets.

Nigel Biggar, professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology from the University of Oxford, England, will present talks titled “Christian Love and Forgiveness in the Role of Religious Ethics in Contemporary Liberal Society.” The lectures are part of an on-going series on Davidson’s church relatedness. Biggar studies the formative bearing of religious concepts in everyday moral decision making.

Christopher Bakken is the author of two books of poetry, including Goat Funeral, and a culinary memoir entitled Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table. He also co-translated The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios. He has been awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and he served as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Bucharest. He teaches at Allegheny College.

Hank Greely, an expert in reproduction ethics and law, Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law at Stanford University, is the Director, Center for Law and the Biosciences; Professor (by courtesy) of Genetics, Stanford School of Medicine; Chair, Steering Committee of the Center for Biomedical Ethics; and Director, Stanford Interdisciplinary Group on Neuroscience and Society. Professor Greely believes that in 20–40 years, most babies of parents with good health coverage will be conceived through in-vitro fertilization, so that those parents can take advantage of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. The problems with IVF that make it unpopular now will be overcome by learning how to turn skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (already possible) and then differentiating those iPSCs into eggs. Greely will discuss the science making those developments possible, the political, economic and social factors that will make them likely, and their ethical implications. This lecture is part of the Ethics Forum series hosted by the Vann Center for Ethics at Davidson College.

Marie Howe is the current Poet Laureate of New York State. She has published three volumes of poetry: The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, The Good Thief and What the Living Do. She is also co-editor of In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Howe has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Reviewand The Partisan Review. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

2013 Conarroe Lecture: Robert Caro, recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes in biography spoke to a sold-out audience in the Duke Family Performance Hall at Davidson College on Tuesday, Feb. 26.

Paul Leonard '62, Common Hour: What Is Church?

2013 Wearn Lecture featuring Angela Davis: Political Activism and Protest from the 1960s to the Age of Obama

Professor Holland will share passages from Romantic and Victorian writers that have been favorites of students through the years.

Rutger's University professor of history, Camilla Townsend, will present this year's Kelley Lecture in Historical Studies. Townsend has written three books and essays that seek to recover the distant voices of indigenous people. Her presentation concerns an Algonkian-speaking indigenous man captured by Spaniards in 1561. Although the man spent the next decade with the spanish, converted to christianity, and won the love and respect of his captors, he eventually led a war party to kill a group of priests attempting to establish a mission in his homeland. His motives for doing so, Townsend will argue, are complicated.

Using her experiences with the modern Freedom Schools movement, Dr. Middleton-Hairston engages with us on the importance of encouraging debate and committing to social action to create positive change in the community -- especially when that change challenges the status quo.

Human beings are endowed with a perfectionist impulse: they desire completeness in their lives. Both religion and science are inspired by this impulse and its attending desire. The cultural and literary critic Kenneth Burke makes much of how the impulse and desire can lead human beings to become "rotten with perfection." Both religion and science have been accused of cultivating this "disease." In the case of science, the accusation is leveled at the "progress" made possible by developments in biotechnology that our transforming our understanding of what it means to be a human being. Hyde encourages audience participation in coming to terms with the truth and/or falsehood of the accusation. Special attention is given to the rhetoric that informs these terms of understanding.

Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, delivers the annual Cornelson Distinguished Lecture in Economics. As director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, Glaeser studies the economics of cities, and writes on urban issues such as the growth of cities, segregation, crime, and housing markets. He is particularly interested in the role that geographic proximity can play in creating knowledge and innovation.

Joan Lipkin is an award-winning playwright , activist, and founding artistic director of That Uppity Theater Company in St. Louis, Missouri, who specializes in creating original work with underrepresented populations including people with disabilities, women with cancer, LGBT youth and adults, seniors, adolescent girls, college students and youth at risk. In this combination reading/lecture, Lipkin will read her essay, "The Wedding Table Cloth" from the forthcoming anthology, Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage (Seal Press, 2012) and further speak about her own project, The State of Marriage.

Rebecca Davis is an experienced church educator and Professor of Religion at Presbyterian College. She will Lecture on Presbyterian Education.

Allen Verhey is Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity School, President elect of the Society of Christian Ethics, and the author of numerous books including Remebering Jesus: CHristian Community, Scripture and the Moral Life (2002). Here he lectures on Jesus as a teacher.

Award-winning poet Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, presents the college’s annual Conarroe Lecture. His presentation “Reading Poetry, Poetry Reading” focuses on ideas discussed in his bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. Hirsch discusses the particular nature of reading poetry—how it works, what it entails, and the intimacy it establishes through language. Hirsch also reads some of his own works, including poems from his book The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems.

The speaker is Dr. Robin Lovin, the Cary M. McGuire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University. Christian reflection on ethics and politics begins with Augustine's City of God, a classic text written in a time of change. Augustine thus provides the continuity for our understanding of Christian ethics, but he does that with an acute sense for the fragility of everything in the world of our immediate experience, especially the impermanence of things we think are permanent and the incomprehensibility of the things we think we understand. Being able to make limited choices wisely amid changes and confusion is what Christian ethics is all about, and it is particularly important to be clear about that in times like Augustine's and like ours, when the prevailing certainties have been called into question. Professor Lovin is the author of several books, most recently An Introduction to Christian Ethics: Goals, Duties, and Virtues (Abingdon, 2011). Sponsored by the Vann Center for Ethics, the Department of Religion, and the Religious Life Office.

This "Time & Place" panel discussion is a continuation of the "Time & ... " series. It follows the lecture "Time and the Roman" and precedes "Time and Consciousness." In this discussion three panelists Professor Brad Johnson of Environmental Studies, Professor Jane Mangan from the History Department and Professor Pat Sellers from Political Science discuss "Time and Place" as it relates to their specific disciplines.

Could Abraham Lincoln's 1864 bid for re-election have survived contemporary political campaigning? Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a noted scholar at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, considers that question in a public lecture at Davidson College. The talk is entitled "How Today's Consulting Tactics Could Have Unseated Lincoln." Jamieson's talk serves as the college's annual McGaw Lecture, and is sponsored by the college's 2012 Coordinating Committee for the Democratic National Convention. Her talk at Davidson is co-sponsored by the college's Public Lectures Committee, the Communication Studies program, the Departments of Sociology and English, the Vann Center for Ethics, and the Center for Civic Engagement at Davidson.

Shannon McFayden has invested over 25 years in helping leaders and organizations drive results. Now a highly respected consultant and executive coach, Shannon is known for her expertise in leadership effectiveness, communications, talent management and organizational culture.

A public Lecture on the central themes of Ovid's masterpiece by Dr. Richard Tarrant, Pope Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Harvard University. Sponsored by Davidson's Department of Classics and Theater.

Professor Feeney focuses on the role of Time in the life of the both the elite and the everyday Roman citizen. He looks at questions like "how did Romans tell time at night, without help from the sun?" and "Before set calendars were invented, how did Romans conceptualize days of the week?" This lecture is part of the "Time and..." series, which focuses on various topics and their relationship in time.