Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Amy Kind is Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, where she has been on the faculty since 1997. Her research interests lie broadly in the philosophy of mind, but most of her work centers on issues relating to imagination and to phenomenal consciousness. 

In addition to authoring the introductory textbook Persons and Personal Identity (Polity, 2015), she has edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination (Routledge, 2016) and she has co-edited Knowledge Through Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her edited volume Philosophy of Mind in the 20th and 21th Centuries, volume six of a six volume series on the history of philosophy, will be published by Routledge in 2018. She has previously served as president of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology and as a member of the board of officers of the American Philosophical Association.

Professor Kind's Athenaeum presentation celebrates her installation ceremony as the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at CMC.

 

View Video: YouTube with Amy Kind

Leah Litman is assistant professor of law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law where she teaches and writes on constitutional law with a particular focus on federalism and federal post-conviction review. Her publications have appeared or will appear in leading law reviews around the country. She is an active blogger at Take Care, and a guest host on First Mondays, a podcast about the Supreme Court. She also maintains an active pro bono practice and has served as counsel in several recent cases including as counsel to the family of Jesus Hernandez in Hernandez v. Mesa, a case involving a cross-border shooting and Whole Woman’s Health in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a successful challenge to two Texas restrictions on abortion. She also regularly files amicus briefs in the Supreme Court and the courts of appeal. 

A graduate of the University of Michigan’s Law School, she clerked first for Judge Sutton on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and then Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Before joining the faculty at UCI, she was a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School and practiced for two years at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr.

Eugene Volokh is professor of law at UCLA Law School where he teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic; he has also often taught criminal law, copyright law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. In addition to his academic work, he has also filed briefs in about 75 appellate cases throughout the country, has argued in over 20 federal and state appellate cases, and has filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (6th ed. 2016) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 75 widely published and frequently cited law review articles. He is a member of The American Law Institute; a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel; the founder and co-author of The Volokh Conspiracy, a Weblog that was hosted by the Washington Post and is now at Reason Magazine; and an academic affiliate for the Mayer Brown LLP law firm.

A graduate of UCLA Law School, he clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Funding for this Athenaeum panel is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund.

Mark Valer is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Valeri’s areas of specialization include religion and social thought, especially economics, in America; Reformation theology and the political history of Calvinism; Puritanism; and enlightenment moral philosophy. Valeri came to Washington University from Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, where he served as the Ernest Trice Thompson Professor of Church History since 1996. His prior appointment was in the Religious Studies department at Lewis and Clark College.

His latest book, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, (Princeton University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. It was also shortlisted for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion and selected as one of Choice magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010. The book analyzes social transformations in the American economy from the early 1600's, when Puritans argued that personal profit should be subordinate to the common welfare, to the 1740's, when Christians increasingly celebrated commerce as an unqualified good. 

Valeri has received several fellowships, including an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies grant, and a Lilly Endowment faculty fellowship. Valeri earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University, his M.Div. from Yale Divinity School, and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Whitworth College.

He is currently working on religious persuasion, evangelicalism, and secularism in the eighteenth century.