PBK Visiting Scholar
The Visiting Scholar Program offers undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars. The purpose of the program is to contribute to the intellectual life of the institution by fostering interaction between Visiting Scholars and the resident students and faculty. The Visiting Scholar spends two days on each campus, participating in class discussions, meeting informally with students, and giving a public lecture open to the academic community and the general public.
History
In 2017, Phi Beta Kappa received a gift from Carl F. Cranor, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at University of California-Riverside, to establish an endowment in support of the Society’s Visiting Scholar Program. Every year the Carl F. Cranor Family Endowment for the Visiting Scholar Program funds a Scholar whose visits will include at least one to a Phi Beta Kappa chapter campus located in Southern California.
More information about Cranor’s scholarship and background, visit the following website.
Upcoming Lectures
Douglas E. Christie is Professor Emeritus in the Theological Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University.
Professor Christie is the author of The Word in The Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford, 1993), The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Note for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford, 2013), and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss and the Common Life (Oxford, 2022). He has been awarded fellowships from the Luce Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2013-2015 he served as Co-director of the Casa de la Mateada study abroad program in Córdoba, Argentina, a program rooted in the Jesuit vision of education for solidarity. He lives with his family in Los Angeles. He is currently working on a book on the desert as spiritual landscape.
More information about Prof. Christie’s visit is coming soon!
Past Lectures
Natalia Molina, 2024
April 16, 2024 | Natalia Molina explores the interconnected histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow and winner of the Popular Culture Association book award.
Mark D. Hayward, 2023
April 20, 2023 | Mark D. Hayward has served on numerous scientific advisory boards at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, major foundations.
Donald S. Lopez Jr., 2022
April 20-21, 2022 | Donald S. Lopez Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan.
Roger Guenveur Smith, 2021
May 5-6, 2021 | Roger Guenveur Smith adapted his Obie Award-winning performance of A HUEY P. NEWTON STORY into a Peabody Award-winning telefilm.
Richard Alley, 2020
Dr. Richard Alley (PhD 1987, Geology, Wisconsin) is Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at Penn State. He studies the great ice sheets and climate.
Natasha Trethewey, 2019
Dr. Natasha Trethewey is the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. She previously spent 15 years at Emory University.