This November, scholars and activists from around the world will gather at UK to attend the 5th Biennial Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society. Arnold Farr, a philosopher and social theorist here at the University of Kentucky, is organizing the conference, which seeks to examine “Emancipation, New Sensibility, and the Challenge of a New Era.”
This past April, the University of Kentucky's Jewish Studies Program was lucky enough to host a lecture with renowned scholar and author Catherine Rottenberg. The talk, titled "The Making of an Icon: Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side," concluded a series of special events hosted over the past year by the Jewish Studies Program. Rottenberg is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics and the Gender Studies Program of Ben Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel. She is also the author of Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature.
According to recent research, approximately one in five Americans don’t identify with a religion. Will Gervais, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, studies the origins of atheism, and is a recent addition to UK's faculty. In January 2013, he co-authored an article, "The Origins of Religious Disbelief," in the journal, Trends in cognitive sciences. Co-written with Ara Norenzayan from the University of British Columbia, the article defines four different types of atheism and their origins.
