Public Lectures

Brian Goldstone is a journalist and National Fellow at New America. He is the author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, forthcoming from Crown in 2025. He received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Duke University. From 2012 to 2015, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from Fulbright, the Wenner-GrenFoundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. His longform reporting and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, Guernica, and Jacobin, among other publications. He lives with his family in Atlanta.

Matthew Clemente is a Lecturer at Boston College specializing in existentialism, philosophy of religion, and contemporary Continental thought. He is the co-author of Technology and Its Discontents: The Perils of Ethical Distancing (2024), and the author of Posttraumatic Joy: A Seminar on Nietzsche’s Tragicomic Philosophy (2023) and Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion (2019).

D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science and writer/editor, was a 2013-2014 Guggenheim Fellow at Bard Graduate Center in NYC. He received a 2009 Mellon New Directions Fellowship, focusing on connections between sciences and visual arts. Graduating as salutatorian from Princeton in 1993 and a recipient of the Pyne Prize, Burnett went on to earn a Ph.D. at Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar. He won the 1999 Nebenzahl Prize in History of Cartography and was involved with the History of Cartography Project. Before joining Princeton in 2001, he taught at Yale, was a Mellon Fellow at Columbia University, and a fellow at the NY Public Library. His interests span natural history, earth and sea sciences, cartography, navigation, oceanography, and ecology.

Kristján Kristjánsson, Ph.D. (University of St. Andrews) is Professor of Character Education and Virtue Ethics in the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham, UK. His research orientation is that of Aristotle-inspired philosophical scrutiny of theories in educational psychology and values education, with special emphasis on the notions of character and virtuous emotions. He has written extensively on themes in moral education, educational psychology, moral philosophy, and professional ethics. He has published over 200 articles in international journals and is the editor of the Journal of Moral Education.

Tom Harrison, Ph.D., is the Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor for Education Innovation at the University of Birmingham. He is also the Deputy Director of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues. Tom is an HEA Principal Fellow, National Teaching Fellow, and Secretary and Trustee for the Society for Educational Studies (SES). Tom Harrison’s specialist interests are innovation in education, character education, graduate attributes, and digital wisdom. Tom researches, publishes, and gives presentations in the UK and Internationally on these topics as well as developing resources and training programs for schools, the voluntary sector, and other organizations. His most recent book is Thrive – how to cultivate character so your children can flourish online won the IFFD Global Award.

Dr. Ariel Glucklich is a kibbutz-born Israeli who immigrated to the United States after the 1973 Middle East War. He majored in Philosophy and Religion at Claremont Men’s College and pursued doctoral studies in Hinduism and Judaism at Harvard where he received a PhD in 1984. He has taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Claremont Graduate School, Pomona College, Emory University, St. Lawrence University and, finally, Georgetown. His early publications, both articles and books, focused on the normative (dharmic) traditions of Hinduism. Later he became interested in phenomenology and ritual aspects of Hinduism before broadening his interest to cover psychological studies of religion—specifically pain and pleasure. This has included bio-psychological and evolutionary-adaptive approaches to the role of affect in religious experience as well as the role of religion in social and cultural evolution.

Dr. Brian Treanor is a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, where he has won numerous teaching awards and held the Charles S. Casassa SJ Chair, the Taylor Chair in Philosophy, and the Daum Chair in the Liberal Arts. His journey to academia was long and atypical. Having dropped out of college to move to Japan, he eventually completed undergraduate studies at UCLA, after which he spent the better part of a decade traveling and engaged in serial autodidactism. He completed graduate studies at Boston College. He is the author or editor of ten books, including: Melancholic Joy (Bloomsbury 2021), Philosophy in the American West (Routledge 2020), Carnal Hermeneutics (Fordham 2015), Emplotting Virtue (SUNY 2014), and Interpreting Nature (Fordham 2013).

Ben Lerner is the author of four books of poetry (The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, Mean Free Path, and The Lights), three novels (Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and The Topeka School), and a work of criticism, The Hatred of Poetry. He has published several collaborations with artists, including Blossom (with Thomas Demand) and The Snows of Venice (with Alexander Kluge). His essays can be found in Harper's, Poetry, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Lerner has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Howard, and MacArthur Foundations. He's been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (fiction), the National Book Award (poetry), and the National Book Critics Circle Award (fiction). Recent honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Topeka School, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times.

Donna Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D. teaches at NYU, Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, and in private study groups. She also offers clinical consultation/supervision in these institutes and beyond. Her recent books include Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies (2010), The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011), and most recently, Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear (2020).

Matthew Clemente is a Fellow in the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics, a Lecturer at Boston College specializing in existentialism, philosophy of religion, and contemporary Continental thought, and the author of Technology and Its Discontents: The Perils of Ethical Distancing (with David M. Goodman, Oxford University Press, 2024), Posttraumatic Joy: A Seminar on Nietzsche’s Tragicomic Philosophy (Routledge, 2023) and Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion (Routledge, 2019). He serves as the Coeditor in Chief of the Journal of Continental Philosophy and Religion (Brill) and the Codirector of the Guestbook Project, a 501c3 nonprofit.

Eric Severson, Ph.D. is an associate teaching professor of philosophy at Seattle University and a philosopher specializing in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. He is author of Before Ethics (Kendall Hunt, 2021), Levinas's Philosophy of Time (Duquesne University Press, 2013) and Scandalous Obligation (Beacon Hill Press, 2011), and editor of eight other books. Severson teaches philosophy at Seattle University.

Dr. Lynne Layton has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and in Clinical Psychology. She is a graduate of and has taught and supervised at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and she is a Corresponding Member of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Psychiatry Department at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of the 2020 book, Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes, winner of a 2021 book award from the American Academy and Board of Psychoanalysis.

Dr. Layton will be joined by respondents Dr. Kathleen Pape of Seattle University and Dr. Grin Lord of the University of Washington.

Dr. Liz Gulliford is currently Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Northampton, UK. She has carried out extensive conceptual and empirical work in positive psychology and moral education. Dr. Gulliford has a long-standing interest in research on character strengths and virtues, including gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, courage and hope, and her work has been published in a range of journals in psychology, education, and philosophy. She also studied for a BA (now MA) at Trinity College, Oxford (1998).

Dr. Gulliford will be joined by respondent Dr. Steve Sandage of Boston University.

William J. Hendel, J.D. is a teaching fellow and Ph.D. student in the Department of Philosophy at Boston College who specializes in ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. He is the co-editor of misReading Plato with Matthew Clemente and Bryan Cocchiara (Routledge, 2022).

Dr. Shiloh Whitney is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, a critical phenomenologist, and a feminist philosopher. Whitney is leading efforts to theorize affective injustice and emotional labor. Her book project on affective injustice aims to theorize uniquely affective varieties of injustice: just as epistemic injustices concern knowledge and credibility, affective injustices concern emotions and affective influence. Beginning with a study of the phenomenon of anger gaslighting as a paradigm case, she develops concepts for identifying and evaluating affective injustices and our agency to intervene in them. Affective life, she argues, is a powerful site of political struggle.

Dr. Shiloh Whitney will be joined by respondent Dr. Jerome Veith.

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn is Professor of History at SU and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the UVA. She is the author of three books: Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement,1890-1945, Race Experts: How Sensitivity Training, Interracial Etiquette, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution (W. W. Norton, 2001); & Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living. Editor of three books and author of numerous articles in both scholarly and public venues such as The New Republic and The Hedgehog Review, she has received numerous grants and awards, including a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Rome, Italy.