Washington University’s Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences will present Celebrating Our Books, Recognizing Our Authors, its second annual faculty book colloquium, at 4 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 4, in the Ann W. Olin Women’s Building Formal Lounge.
The event, which honors the work of scholars from across the arts and sciences disciplines, is free and open to the public. The Ann W. Olin Women’s Building is located just north of Olin Library on the university’s Hilltop Campus. For more information call (314) 935-5576.
In conjunction with the event, the Washington University Campus Store will display books by colloquium participants, all of which will be available for purchase, and authors will be available after the colloquium to sign their works.
William H. Danforth, chancellor emeritus and vice chairman of the Board of Trustees of Washington University, will present opening remarks. In addition, Pascal Boyer, Ph.D., the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory in Arts & Sciences, and Rebecca Messbarger, Ph.D., associate professor of Romance languages in Arts & Sciences, will read from their recent publications and take questions from the audience.
Boyer is the author of Tradition as Truth and Communication (1990), The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (1994) and Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (2001). His scholarship combines anthropological fieldwork and psychological experiments, and aims to describe the psychological foundations of culture.
Messbarger is the author of The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse (2002), which the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago recently nominated for the International Flaiano Prize, awarded by the Ministry of Italian Culture. Messbarger is writing a book on the life and work of Anna Morandi Manzolini.