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Speakers
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Ph.D., is faculty emeritus of philosophical theology at Yale Divinity School, where he previously held the Noah Porter Professorship of Philosophical Theology. He earned his B.A. at Calvin College and his doctorate. from Harvard.
After concentrating on metaphysics at the beginning of his career, Dr. Wolterstorff spent many years working on aesthetics and philosophy of art, publishing Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford, 1980) and Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Eerdmans 1980; 2nd ed., 1995). He then produced seminal work in epistemology (John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, Cambridge, 1996; Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology, Cambridge, 2001); political philosophy (Until Justice and Peace Embrace, Eerdmans, 1983; 2nd ed., 1994); and philosophy of religion (Divine Discourse, Cambridge, 1995). His newest book, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, will be available in 2008 from Princeton University Press.
He has been president of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division) and of the Society of Christian Philosophers. His current research brings together two of his earlier interests: beauty and justice and how they relate. Dr. Wolterstorff has long been a thoughtful and articulate spokesperson for Christian higher education, and his Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans, 2004) won the first Lilly Fellows Network Book Award.
Christine Chaney, Ph.D., is associate professor of English and chair of the English department at Seattle Pacific University. She was founding review editor of the scholarly journal Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture (Duke University Press) and is the former assistant director of the PEW-funded “Preparing Future Faculty” project at the University of Washington Graduate School.
She earned her bachelor’s primarily from the Los Angeles and Berkeley campuses of the University of California and her master’s and doctorate from the University of Washington. Her academic pursuits and publications are unusually cross-disciplinary for someone whose ostensible teaching home is the world of Victorian literature.
Dr. Chaney’s dissertation focused on aesthetics and subjectivity in self-authored texts of the British 18th and 19th centuries, anchored in the formative influence of German Idealist philosophy. Her journal articles include “The Rhetorical Strategies of ‘Turbulent Emotions’: Wollstonecraft's Letters in Sweden” in The Journal of Narrative Theory (vol. 34, no. 3), Fall 2004, and “The Prophet-Poet’s Book” in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (vol. 48, no. 4), Autumn 2008, guest-edited by U.C. Knoepflmacher of Princeton University.
Her book chapters include “The Intimate Familiar: Essay as Autobiography in Romanticism” in Romantic Autobiography in England, edited by Eugene Stelzig of SUNY-Geneseo (Ashgate, 2008) and a forthcoming chapter on teaching literary theory at religious universities in The Word in the English Classroom, edited by Jamie Dessart and Brad Gambill (Abilene Christian Press).
Dr. Chaney’s interest in the narrative strategies of truth-telling and their intersection with the beautiful and the good will form part of a larger book project she hopes to complete in the next several years.
Benita Wolters-Fredlund, Ph.D., is assistant professor at Calvin College, where she teaches courses in music history and music theory. After completing an undergraduate degree in music and philosophy at Redeemer University College, she went on to complete M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in musicology at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, respectively.
Dr. Wolters-Fredlund’s research interests include social and cultural aspects of music of North America, especially themes of identity and musical meaning as related to music of the political left, Jewish music, and musical modernism. Some of her recent published articles on these themes can be found in Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music and Canadian Journal of Traditional Music.
After writing her doctoral dissertation on the history of the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir, Dr. Wolters-Fredlund has become increasingly fascinated by music written during or about the Holocaust, and the reception of such works. Articles in progress related to this theme include “Judas Maccabaeus as Revolutionary Jewish Folk Hero: Yiddish Performances of Handel’s Oratorio During the Holocaust” and “Celebrating Jewish Resistance: Max Helfman’s post-Holocaust cantata Di Naye Hagode.”
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