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Knowledge and Belief

25th Anniversary Conference and Reunion
October 14 - 15, 2005

statement | speakers | schedule

All sessions are free and open to the public.
Meals and social events are for former fellows and their families.

Friday, October 14

1:00 p.m. Opening Remarks

1:30 Opening Session

Marjorie Garber
Loaded Words

Wanda Corn
Seeing is Believing: Art as Church in the Modern Age

Takashi Fujitani
Patriotism: Belief, Knowledge, Apostasy

Brad Gregory
Religion, Secular Beliefs, and the Humanities

3:00 p.m.  Break

3:30 p.m. Session #1 (4 panels)

Philosophical Evidence
Eckart Forster, Chair
Completeness

Richard Rorty
William James on the Right to Believe Without Evidence

Wolfgang Welsch
Experiences of Philosophical Prime Evidences

Our Knowledge, Their Belief
Vilashini Cooppan, Chair

Arturo Arias
The 'Mongolic Stain' and the Emergence of a New Maya Literature

Joel Beinen
Imperial Projects and the Politics of Knowledge: "Knowledge" and Magical Beliefs about the Contemporary Middle East

David Palumbo-Liu
Wallerstein, Fanon, and the Politics of Rationality

Belief Outside Religion
Harriet Ritvo, Chair
Principal Arguments and Lost Causes
Mary Louise Gill
Plato on False Belief

Stephen Orgel
Open Secrets

Knowledge and Classification
Ellen Pader, Chair
The Civil Rights Act of 1866: A Moving Target of Racial, Ethnic and Nativistic Relations

Hamilton Cravens
Changing Notions of Race in Modern America: An Example

Tom Lutz
Our Knowledge, Their Belief: Feeling the Re-election on the Web

5:00 p.m.  Conference Reunion Reception

7:00 p.m. Group gatherings

 

Saturday, October 15

9:00 a.m.  Breakfast refreshments

9:30 a.m. Session #2 (3 panels)

The Arts and Belief
Alexander Nemerov, Chair
Morris Louis, et al.: History Painters to Liberal America

Kristin Schwain
Consuming Belief: Religion and Experience in 20th Century American Art

Jason Weems
God's Eye, Man's Design: Aerial Vision, the American Dream, and the Greenbelt City

Knowledge in Language
Geoffrey Nunberg, Chair
The Shadow Cast by Language Upon Truth

Seth Lerer
Language and Knowledge in the History of English

Thomas Wasow
Knowledge of Language

Aesthetics as a Form of Belief
Robert Polhemus, Chair
Aesthetic Devices to Root out Evil

Dawn Coleman
The Rhetoric of Belief: American Fiction and the Sermonic Mode

Steven Meyer
What Kind of Belief is the Suspension of Disbelief?

11:00 a.m. Session #3 (3 panels)

Genealogy of Knowledge and Belief
Daniel Herwitz, Chair
The Humanities in Dependence

Robert Harrison
S'io credessi

Tyrus Miller
"The nickel samovar is in flight above our heads": Dadaism and the Genealogy of Revolutionary Messianism

Kevin Platt
Mass History, Public History, Popular History: Using the Russian Past in an Age of Modernization

Gender, Power, and Belief
Hilary Schor, Chair

Madeleine Kahn
"That wall isn't real unless I say so:" Knowledge vs. Belief at a Women's College

Bonnie McElhinny
Recontextualizing the American Occupation of the Philippines: Colonial Discourse Around Men, Medicine and Infant Mortality

Heather Webb
Vital Heat: Medical and Theological Distributions of Potency

The Philosophy of Belief
Joseph Sartorelli, Chair

Peter Gilgen
What does it mean to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith?

Steven Mailloux
Religious Faith, Pragmatist Truth

Gonzalo Munevar
Against the Linguistic Interpretation of Knowledge and Belief

12:30 p.m.   Lunch at the Humanities Center

2:00 p.m. Session #4 (3 panels)

Knowledge within Religion
Jonathan Schofer, Chair
Exegetical Reasoning and the Foundations of Knowledge in Classical Judaism

Mark Csikszentmihalyi
Divination, Sacrifice and Knowledge in Early China

Marilynn Desmond
Poetic Knowledge and Christian Ethics: The Goddess Diana in the OVIDE MORALISE

Cross-cultural Variants of Religion and Belief
James Robson, Chair
The Magic Word: Did Chinese Buddhists Believe in Their Spells?

Lisa Claypool
Believing is Seeing: Representations of Natural History Museums in Late Imperial China

Gordana Crnkovic
Two Deaths, Quran, and a Novel (Bosnian Mesa Selimovic's Death and the Dervish)

The Practice of Belief
Mia Bruch, Chair
The Popular Representation of American Faith: Civic Religions Past and Present

Dorian Llywelyn
The Apparition of Politics

Martha Newman
Miracle and Knowledge in Medieval Monastic Culture

3:30 p.m Wine and Cheese

5:30 p.m  Conference and Reunion Dinner
Stanford Golf Course Grill