Dr. Sybril Bennett, professor of journalism, was the keynote speaker at the Sixth Annual Walter Murray Jr. Commons Lecture on Feb. 3 at Vanderbilt University. This lecture commemorates Walter Murray Jr., the first African-American member of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust, and annually honors the contributions and lives of African-Americans in the Vanderbilt University community. The Walter Murray Lecture is sponsored Vanderbilt’s Martha Rivers Ingram Commons, the Black Student Alliance and the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center. 

Dr. Pete Kuryla, associate professor of history, has published a chapter in a book about the transatlantic dimensions of the thought and life of the American philosopher William James. The book, William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Philosophy of Religion, published by Oxford University Press, is edited by Martin Halliwell and Joel Rasmussen. It features chapters authored by a transatlantic group of philosophers and intellectual historians. Kuryla’s chapter is entitled “Vastations and Prosthetics: Henry James Sr. and the Transatlantic Education of William and Henry James.” In the chapter, Kuryla explores the ways that William James, in his philosophy and in his psychological research, recapitulated, in poetic terms, the trauma that followed his father Henry’s loss of a leg at the age of thirteen. In other words, the father and his famous sons explored dimensions of reality by means of poetic mediations designed to reveal the inability of human beings to fully represent that reality. All three men used literary devices or tricks—prostheses of a sort—to explore hidden or often unobserved corners of reality and, in doing so, hid or falsified features of their autobiographies, thereby fracturing the self in order to explore the complexities of selfhood.

Curb College Assistant Professor of Music Business Cheryl Slay Carr, a member of the Board of Directors of Jazz Education Network (JEN), attended the JEN Board of Directors meeting and annual conference in Dallas, Texas to launch the organization’s Jazz Business committee, of which she is chairman.  The new committee will expand the organization’s focus by providing resources and information concerning jazz as a commercial enterprise and general business and legal issues affecting the music business.

Fortress Press has announced the publication of a new book by Dr. Amanda C. Miller, School of Religion assistant professor, called Rumors of Resistance:  Status Reversals and Hidden Transcripts in the Gospel of Luke.