New Faculty Seminar Series

Fall 2009 Schedule

Join us this fall for the New Faculty Seminar Series, now in its third year, where we will feature the work of four new colleagues in the Humanities at UB (two each semester). By bringing together scholars from a variety of fields, we hope that these seminars will initiate and encourage the development of interdisciplinary conversations.

The seminars are free and open to the public; light refreshments will be served.

Our first speaker for the semester is Jean-Jacques Thomas, the Melodia E. Jones Professor of French, who specializes in poetry and poetics, nineteenth and twentieth-century French literature and culture, as well as Quebec and Canadian Studies. He has taught at the Université de Paris-VIII, the University of Michigan, Columbia University and Duke University. He has published several books on poetics and contemporary French literature, most recently Poeticized Language with Steven Winspur. He has two forthcoming books, one on the Haitian-Quebecois poet Joël Des Rosiers and the other on Jacques Roubaud, a French poet and mathematician.

Our second seminar features Aaron Hughes, Associate Professor of History and the Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Studies, who specializes in medieval Jewish and Islamic Neo-Platonists, comparative religions, and more recently, the Jewish intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance. Professor Hughes arrived from the University of Calgary, where he spent the previous eight years. He is the author of The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy (Indiana 2008), Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (London: Equinox 2008); Jewish Philosophy, A-Z (Palgrave 2005); The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought ( Indiana 2004). He also has two edited collections forthcoming this year: New Directions in Jewish Philosophy with Elliot R. Wolfson (Indiana 2009) and Defining Judaism: A Reader (Equinox 2009).

The text for the seminar is now available. Email the Humanities Institute for a copy. 

Spring 2010 Schedule

In the spring semester, we will host two more seminars, featuring Dalia Muller, Assistant Professor of History, on Tuesday, February 23rd at 3:30pm; and Camilo Trumper, Assistant Professor of American Studies, on Tuesday, March 16th at 3:30pm. For each event, there will be a pre-circulated paper posted to our website beforehand in preparation for the works-in-progress seminars.

Past Seminars

Fall 2008 Schedule

Spring 2009 Schedule