Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor Event

Wendy Chun

Public Lecture 1: Beyond Verification: Authenticity and Mis/Disinformation

That fake news has affected recent political events in the U.S. and abroad has become a truism; the sense that combating fake news entails more than fact checking and verification similarly has become accepted wisdom. So how do we understand and respond to fake news? This talk will map out different approaches to fake news in diverse disciplines / sectors, and outline a response that focuses on understanding why and how users find information to be true regardless of its facticity. Framing fake news as an inter-medial narrative, It will outline an approach based in dramatic / literary conceptions of authenticity.

Date: April 10, 2020
Time: 4:30 PM

See: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/critical_inquiry_visiting_professor_wendy_chun/

Today's lecture by Pyi Phyo Kyaw of King's College is the fifth in a series, The Jun Zhou Lectures in Theravada Buddhism.

Event will be held in Swift Hall Common Room (1st floor).

The Divinity School is pleased to offer a series of six lectures on various topics in Theravada Buddhism during the 2019-2020 academic year.

Schedule:

Tuesday, October 22

Justin McDaniel, Professor of Religious Studies, The University of Pennsylvania

Monday, November 4

Alicia Turner, York College

Monday, January 14,

Thomas Borchert, University of Vermont

Monday, February 17

Kate Crosby, King's College London

Monday, April 13

Pyi Phyo Kyaw, King's College London

Monday, May 11

Aleix Ruiz Falques, Shan State Buddhist University, Myanmar

This series of six lectures on Theravada Buddhism is supported through a generous gift by Mr. Jun Zhou.

Need an accommodation to attend a Divinity School event? Please contact Suzanne Riggle in advance at 773-702-8219.

Date: April 13, 2020
Time: 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM

A public lecture by Joel Cabrita, Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. Details TBA

Monday, April 13, 4:30pm, Swift Hall Common Room

Date: April 13, 2020
Time: 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM

This public lecture by Joel Cabrita, Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, will take place at 4:30pm in Swift Common Room.

Thanks to a generous gift from Tandean Rustandy (MBA ’07) the Divinity School has in recent years begun to explore the emerging field of Global Christianities. This coming spring the Divinity School will continue its efforts by launching the Rustandy Global Christianity Distinguished Speaker Series.

This lecture series, facilitated through the Martin Marty Center, will bring a group of individual speakers to campus whose intellectual agenda contributes to the study of Global Christianity through the use of a particular set of disciplinary methods and hermeneutical strategies that carve out a new niche while resonating with existing work in the School. This spring’s invited scholars stretch our geographic imagination of global Christianity by considering comparative, diasporic and transnational approaches to the study of Christianity worldwide.

Date: April 13, 2020
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

See: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/martin-marty-center/conferences-and-events/rustandy-lecture-series-global-christianity

The Inclusive Pedagogy Fellows will lead a two-part conversation on inclusive course design. The first part will focus on issues of syllabus design using research on STEM education, inclusive pedagogy across the college campus, UNC Center for Faculty Excellence, and the work of bell hooks. The second part will focus on the technical aspects of Universal Design, primarily drawing on contributions to Universal Design in Higher Education: From Principles to Practice (Harvard Education Press, 2008).

The Inclusive Pedagogy Fellows are a select group of Divinity School PhD students working together to learn best practices for teaching college students. Their work is funded by the Provost’s office and the Divinity School’s Craft of Teaching program.

This event will be offered via the Zoom web-conferencing platform. To participate, please fill out this form https://forms.gle/FE5mWy1MGte92mb26 in advance of the event.

Questions may be directed to Caroline Anglim at CraftofTeaching@uchicago.edu.

Date: April 17, 2020
Time: 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Audrey Gordon (MA’70) is the Divinity School Alumna of the Year for 2020.

Dr. Gordon will deliver her Alumna of the Year lecture, entitled “September Song: The evolution of hospice and end of life care,” on Friday, April 17th, at 4:30pm in Swift Hall's Lecture Hall (3rd floor). A reception will follow; these events are free and open to the public.

A pioneer in the field of end-of-life care, Dr. Gordon has published extensively, held numerous prestigious positions in academia, religious education, and the public health sector, and also maintained a thriving private practice as a family therapist.

Her extraordinary achievements in the fields of death and dying have deeply affected and informed students and practitioners across disciplines, as well as changing the way many in our culture experience death. The work she did with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on the stages of grief is still taught today. Her work in the vanguard of the hospice movement has helped transform a critical area of the American health care system.

Date: April 17, 2020
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor Event

Wendy Chun

Public Lecture 2: Critical Data Studies

Data, we’re told over and over again, defines the 21st century. It’s allegedly the new oil, the new resource to be exploited, as well as the new hidden, “real” layer behind all media. It raises the specter of absolute surveillance and vacuum-sealed echo chambers, all in the name of giving users the commodities, friendships and security they really want. To displace these visions, this talk addresses the possibilities for cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaboration and investigations. It will take as its case study “neighborhoods.”

Date: April 24, 2020
Time: 4:30 PM

See: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/critical_inquiry_visiting_professor_wendy_chun/

A conference of The Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, The University of Chicago Divinity School

In the history of the West, influenced as it has been by the thought of Christianity, nature has been both sanctified as creation and seen as a problem when it defied creation’s normative standards. Insofar as nature was seen as prone to sin, it was perceived to be in need of divine grace to reach perfection. This has led to the development of orthodox concepts like creatio ex nihilo, on the one hand, and fears of pantheism when nature did not conform, on the other. Recent work in gender studies and critical theory have led to a renewed focus on nature as distinct from creation, while the environmental crisis has further impacted religious studies to the point that Barthian and other theological objections to natural theology have gradually made way for more openness to heteronormative views of nature.

Three recent studies canvas the fraught position of nature in the Western tradition in an attempt to analyze it not as an enemy to be feared but as a welcome critical voice and a potential ally of both the divine and the human.

They are, respectively: Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies. Gods, Worlds, Monsters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018);

Virginia Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics. Cosmologies, Saints, Things (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) Willemien Otten, Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking. From Eriugena to Emerson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).

Building on some of the standpoints articulated in these recent studies, this conference aims to serve as a platform for new views on nature and creation, theological and philosophical, historical and theoretical, as the new decade will no doubt see further work in this area.

Starts: April 29, 2020
Ends: May 1, 2020
Time: 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

See: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/martin-marty-center/conferences-and-events/pantheism-creation-emanation-contemporary-reflections

In light of new technologies like CRISPR, the seemingly infinite possibilities of altering the human genome have sparked debate in communities across the globe. Are we reaching new heights in genetic medicine, or are we promulgating eugenics? Join 30 leading thinkers in discussing the ethical, historical, and political context of genetic editing, and its impact on the future of the human.

Starts: April 30, 2020
Ends: May 3, 2020
Time: 5:30 PM

See: https://sifk.uchicago.edu/events/883/genetics-and-eugenics-conference-2020/

Today's lecture by Afe Adogame, Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Religion and SOciety at Princeton University Seminary, will take place at 4:30pm in Swift Common Room.

Thanks to a generous gift from Tandean Rustandy (MBA ’07) the Divinity School has in recent years begun to explore the emerging field of global Christianities. This coming spring the Divinity School will continue its efforts by launching the Rustandy Global Christianity Distinguished Speaker Series.

This lecture series, facilitated through the Martin Marty Center, will bring a group of individual speakers to campus whose intellectual agenda contributes to the study of Global Christianity through the use of a particular set of disciplinary methods and hermeneutical strategies that carve out a new niche while resonating with existing work in the School. This spring’s invited scholars stretch our geographic imagination of global Christianity by considering comparative, diasporic and transnational approaches to the study of Christianity worldwide.

This conference series is funded by a generous gift from Tandean Rustandy (MBA'07).

Date: May 4, 2020
Time: 4:30 AM - 6:00 AM

See: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/martin-marty-center/conferences-and-events/rustandy-lecture-series-global-christianity