Portland Center for Public Humanities at PSU

Kenneth Reinhard is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is an expert in early modern English literature, Shakespeare, psychoanalysis, Jewish studies, and critical theory. He is the author, with Slavoj Zizek and Eric Santner of The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (U.... of Chicago Press, 2005), and with Julia Reinhard Lupton, of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Cornell UP, 1993), as well as articles on Freud, Lacan, Levinas, Henry James, Jewish Studies, and the Bible. He has edited a special issue of Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonialism on Religion with Julia Reinhard Lupton. Currently he is writing a book on the ethics of the neighbor in religion (Torah, Talmud, and Patristic writings), philosophy (Kant, Kierkegaard, Adorno, Rosenzweig, and Levinas), and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) for Princeton University Press.Read More

Chris Cokonos is Associate Professor of English and the "Environment and Society" program, Utah State University. Cokonos writes environment non-fiction and is the editor of Istope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing. He is now an associate professor of English at Utah State University and founding edit...or of Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing. In 2003, he was one of 10 national recipients of the Whiting Writers' Award, given annually to emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise. He is also the winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Fine-Line Prize for Lyric Prose (from Mid-American Review), and the Glasgow Prize for an Emerging Writing of Nonfiction. Cokinos is the winner of fellowships and grants from the American Antiquarian Society, the Utah Arts Council, and the National Science Foundation. In 2003-2004 he was a member of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites expedition for five weeks, as part of his research for The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars. His essays, poems and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, High Country News, Ecotone, Orion, Poetry, Western Humanities Review, and Science, among many other venues.Read More

Thomas Bender is a University Professor of Humanities and History at New York University, and a renowned scholar of urban life, American intellectual history, and the place of the United States in world history. A recipient of the Guggenheim, the Rockefeller, and currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in ...the Behavioral Sciences, he is the author of New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City (1987), Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (1993), The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (2002), and most recently A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006).Read More

Dale Jamieson is Director of the Environmental Studies program at New York University, where he is also Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, and Affiliated Professor of Law. He is also the current Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics at the University of Oregon. A prolific presence in his field, Professo...r Jamieson has authored Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Oxford, 2002) and Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2008); and edited or co-edited seven books, including the forthcoming Climate Ethics (Oxford, 2010). His research has been funded by both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.Read More