Peter P. and Margaret A. D'Angelo Chair

Students and faculty at all levels enjoy a more vibrant academic experience when their university engages them with leading authors, scholars and thinkers from a wide spectrum of academia, government and private industry.

This is the aim of the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities at St. John’s University. Peter P. D’Angelo ‘78MBA, ‘06HON, and Margaret LaRosa D’Angelo ‘70Ed established the Chair in 2007. It draws high-profile, multi- and cross-disciplinary visiting professors to St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences — the University’s oldest academic unit — for a semester of teaching and scholarly exchange.

Visiting professors appointed to the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair will be rotated among the various humanities departments in St. John’s College. The agreement between the D’Angelos and the University offers the following definition of the humanities:

“The humanities are a group of academic subjects united by a commitment to studying aspects of the human condition and a qualitative approach that generally prevents a single paradigm from coming to define any discipline. The humanities are usually distinguished from the social sciences and the natural sciences and include subjects such as Classics, English, History, Languages, Literature, Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies.”

Contact

Teresa Delgado, Ph.D., Dean
St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
718-990-6068
[email protected]

Peter P. and Margaret A. D'Angelo Chair

Owen Flanagan, Ph.D.

Owen Flanagan, Ph.D., James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Duke University, joins the faculty of the Department of PhilosophySt. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, as the 2023 Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities. Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.

Dr. Flanagan has written extensively about the concept of consciousness, recognizing the difficulty of examining it as a scientific and philosophical problem. To achieve an understanding of consciousness, he employs three key elements: paying attention to subjective reports on conscious experiences, incorporating the results from psychology and cognitive science, and including the results from neuroscience that will reveal how neuronal systems produce consciousness. He has also written about ethics and moral psychology and his recent works have explored the diversity of moral systems across the earth for the sake of improving cross-cultural understanding as well as for learning from other traditions. 

A prolific scholar, Dr. Flanagan is the author of How to Do Things with Emotions: What Cross-Cultural Philosophy Teaches About Anger and Shame (Princeton University Press, 2021); The Geography of Morals (Oxford University Press, 2017); Moral Sprouts and Natural Teleology: 21st Century Moral Psychology Meets Classical Chinese Philosophy (Marquette University Press, 2014); The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (MIT Press, 2011); The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (MIT Press, 2007); The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (Basic Books, 2003); and Dreaming Souls (Oxford University Press, 1999).

He is coeditor, with Jeffrey Sachs and Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo and others, of Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development (Columbia University Press, 2022). This book presents an in-depth conversation among interfaith religious leaders and interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners in pursuit of an ethical consensus that could ground sustainable development efforts.

Dr. Flanagan’s current book project, Against Happiness, written with Joseph LeDoux and others, is forthcoming from the Columbia University Press. The volume provides both a theoretical and empirical analysis of the limitations of the “happiness agenda.”

Dr. Flanagan’s chapters and essays appear in many publications, including The Moral Psychology of AngerThe Oneness Hypothesis in Philosophy: Psychology and Religion; Naturalizing Comparative Philosophy: Owen Flanagan and His CriticsThe Routledge Handbook on the Science and Philosophy of AddictionThe Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of PainA Mirror is for Reflection: Understanding Buddhist EthicsPharmaceutical Cures and Mental DisordersThe Return of Consciousness: A New Science on Ancient Questions;NeuroethicsThe Oxford Handbook of Hypo-egoic PhenomenaAddiction and Choice;Philosophy East and WestBuddhist Perspectives on Free WillUnderstanding James and ModernismConsciousness and the Great Philosophers; andExtraordinary Science and Psychiatry: Responses to the Crisis in Mental Health Research.

He has won many prestigious awards, including the Berggruen Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science at Stanford University. He served as a Rockefeller Fellow at the National Humanities Center and is an elected Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion. Also, Dr. Flanagan was a Templeton Distinguished Fellow at the University of Southern California.

Dr. Flanagan holds a Ph.D. from Boston University and a B.A. from Fordham University.

During the spring, he will teach an undergraduate seminar, Philosophy of the Mind, exploring four perennial questions: The Mind-Body Problem, Personal Identity, Free Will and Determinism and Consciousness.

Dr. Flanagan will also deliver two public lectures on the St. John’s Queens and Staten Island, NY, campuses.

Queens Campus

Our Angry Times: Is There a Way Out?
Monday, April 3
1:50 p.m. (Common Hour)
D’Angelo Center, Room 206

Staten Island Campus

Our Angry Times: Is There a Way Out?
Thursday, March 30
1:50 p.m. (Common Hour)
Kelleher Center, Kiernan Suite        

For additional information, please contact Patricia A. Marchia, Executive Secretary, at 718-990-6272; [email protected].

Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.

lisa gail collins headshot

Lisa Gail Collins, Ph.D., Professor of Art History, Africana Studies, and American Studies on the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair at Vassar College, joins the faculties of the Departments of Art and Design and History of St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences as the 2022 Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities. Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.

Dr. Collins is one of the foremost experts on interdisciplinary American art, social, and cultural history, with an emphasis on Black lives. Reflecting her interdisciplinary approach, her research interests encompass art and art-making as social practice and community building; movements for social justice; communities of creativity and care; art, activism, and everyday life; quilt studies; and studies of loss, grief, and mourning. A prolific scholar, Dr. Collins is the author of The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (Rutgers University Press, 2002); Art by African-American Artists: Selections from the 20th Century (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003); and Arts, Artifacts, and African Americans: Context and Criticism (Michigan State University, 2007). She is coeditor, with Margo Natalie Crawford, of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers University Press, 2006) and coauthor of African-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003).

Her book, Love Lies Here: Grief, a Quilt, and the Community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press. The work is an interdisciplinary study of a small African American farming community in southern Alabama during the early 20th century by way of a quilt made in mourning and the memory of its making.

Dr. Collins’ essays appear in African American Review; Chicago Art Journal; Colors; Exposure; International Review of African American Art; Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth; Journal of Southern History; Rutgers Art Review; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; andTransition: An International Review.

She has won several prestigious awards, including an endowed professorship. Dr. Collins was named to the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair at Vassar College, and won the Carolyn Fay Endowment grant to Support Experiential and Integrative Learning; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Creative Arts Across Disciplines Curricular Development Grant; the Consortium on High Achievement and Success Faculty grant for Promoting Student Excellence; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Learning Associate in the Humanities, Bates College; and the Anyone Can Fly Foundation Professional Scholars Grant.

Most recently, Dr. Collins was Visiting Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. In addition, she was a Scholars-in-Residence Fellow funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Academies Research Council; a Career Enhancement Postdoctoral Fellow funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Institute for Citizens and Scholars; and a College Art Association of America, Inc.’s Professional Development Fellowship in American Art.

Dr. Collins holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.

During the spring she will teach an undergraduate and graduate interdisciplinary seminar, New Futures: Art and Activism, focusing on exploring the creative activism of artists of color based in the US and examining ways visual artists and other cultural workers engage urgent issues of our time.

Dr. Collins will also deliver two public lectures on the Queens and Staten Island, NY, campuses.

Queens Campus

Love Lies Here: Grief, a Quilt, and the Community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama
Monday, April 4
1:50 p.m. (Common Hour)
D’Angelo Center, Room 206

Staten Island Campus

Love Lies Here: Grief, a Quilt, and the Community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama
Tuesday, April 5
12:15 p.m.
Kelleher Center, Kiernan Suite        

For additional information, please contact Patricia A. Marchia, Executive Secretary, at 718-990-6272; [email protected].

Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.

Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith, Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the College of Staten Island, The City University of New York, has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Incendiary Art (2017), winner of a 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, winner of the Abel Meeropol Award for Social Justice, and a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Smith joins the English faculty of St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences as the 2020 Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair for the Humanities.

Smith’s other volumes include Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and 2014 winner of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Award; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was a finalist for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection. In addition, she published Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (2015), a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson; Close to Death (1998), Big Towns Big Talk (1992), and Life According to Motown (1991); the children's book Janna and the Kings (2003) and the history Africans in America (1999), a companion book to the award-winning PBS series.

Smith’s work has appeared in The Baffler, Best American Essays, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, and The Washington Post. In addition, she co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir.

Smith is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. In addition to teaching at the College of Staten Island, Smith mentors students in the M.F.A. program at Sierra Nevada College, and conducts writing workshops for Cave Canem (a residency program for African-American writers) and the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Writing Program. 

Smith holds a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Stonecoast, University of Southern Maine.

During the Spring 2020, Smith will teach an undergraduate course, Poetry Workshop, focusing on the spoken word, hybrid forms, formal poetry, prose as poetry, and the emergence of modern poetry as performance and competition. Smith will also deliver two public lectures on the Queens and Staten Island Campuses.

Queens Campus

“Practicing Incendiary Art”
Monday, November 14, 2022 | 1:50 p.m. 
D’Angelo Center, Room 416 A/B

For additional information, please contact Patricia Marchia at 718-990-6272 or [email protected].

Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.

Hasia R. Diner

Hasia R. Diner

Hasia R. Diner, Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, and the Interim Director of Glucksman Ireland House at New York University, is one of the foremost experts on the history of immigration and migration to the United States. She joins the History faculty of St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences as the 2019 Peter and Margaret D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities.

Diner has actively shaped the field of American Jewish history, and her scholarship situates Jews as part of the fabric of American immigration, politics, and urban life. She has also played a leading role in studying the history of immigration to the United States and the phenomena of global migration. Over the course of her prolific career, Diner has written twelve books, edited four volumes, and composed numerous articles. She lectures widely on American Jewish history, American immigration history, and women's history. Diner has won several prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities for Intellectual and Cultural History (2011), and has been a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Research, the American Academy of Jewish Research, and the Society of American Historians. Her book We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (2009) won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and the Saul Viener Prize of American Jewish Historical Society. Diner’s work Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers who Forged the Way (2015) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.

Diner’s books tracing the landscape of Jewish American history include: The Jews of the United States (2004); Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present (2002); Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections (2000); The Lower East Side Memories: The Jewish Place in America (2000); A New Promised Land: A History of the Jews in America (1998) for young readers; A Time for Gathering. 1820-1880: The Second Migration, Vol. 2 in, The Jewish People in America (1995); and In an Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 (1995). Her works on immigration to the United States include: From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the U.S. in a Global Age (2007); Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (2002); and Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (1984).

Diner holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an M.A. from the University of Chicago.  She received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin. 

During the Spring 2019, she will teach an undergraduate course, America: A Nation of Immigrants, focusing on immigration as an integral part of American history. Diner will also deliver two public lectures on the Queens and Staten Island Campuses:

Queens Campus

“Twinned Histories: Irish and Jewish Immigrants to the United States”

Thursday, March 28, 2019

1:50 pm (Common Hour)

Marillac Auditorium

Staten Island Campus

“Twinned Histories: Irish and Jewish Immigrants to the United States”

Thursday, March 14, 2019

1:50 pm (Common Hour)

Kelleher Center, Kiernan Suite

For additional information, please contact Patricia Marchia at 718-990-6272 or [email protected].

Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.

Lee A. McBride III

Lee A. McBride III

Lee A. McBride III, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The College of Wooster (Wooster, OH), has earned recognition for his provocative work in insurrectionist ethics, resistance to oppression, and the philosophy of race. He joins the Philosophy faculty of St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences as the 2018 Peter and Margaret D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities.

McBride specializes in American philosophy, ethics, and political philosophy. He teaches courses in American pragmatism, African American philosophy, philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, environmental ethics, philosophy of food, ancient Greek philosophy, and continental philosophy. McBride was elected to the board of directors for both the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (2014-2017) and the William James Society (2012-2015). He is a member of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy’s Committee on Public Philosophy (2017-2020) and previously served on the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers (2014-2017).

A prolific author of book chapters and journal articles on classical American figures such as Henry David Thoreau, John Dewey, and Alain Locke, McBride’s most recent research draws upon the work of Leonard Harris, María Lugones, and Angela Davis. He is currently editing a collection of Leonard Harris’s insurrectionist philosophy and working on a book tentatively titled Bold Comportment: Forays in Insurrectionist Ethics. McBride was guest editor for a symposium on insurrectionist ethics in the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society (49, no. 1, Winter 2013), and his recent and forthcoming publications include: “Race, Multiplicity, and Impure Coalitions of Resistance,” Philosophizing the Americas: An Inter-American Discourse, eds. Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Hernando A. Estévez (Fordham, forthcoming); “Anger and Approbation,” Moral Psychology of Anger, eds. Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming); “New Descriptions, New Possibilities,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 32, no. 1 (forthcoming); “Leftist Democratic Politics,” Jahrbuch Praktische Philosophie in globaler Perspektive / Yearbook Practical Philosophy in a Global Perspective, eds. Michael Reder, Dominik Finkelde, Alexander Filipovic, and Johannes Wallacher (Verlag Karl Alber, 2017); “Insurrectionist Ethics and Racism,” The Oxford Handbook of Race and Philosophy, ed. Naomi Zack (Oxford, 2017); “Insurrectionist Ethics and Thoreau,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 49, no. 1 (2013); and “Agrarian Ideals and Practices,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 25, no. 4 (2012).

McBride holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Purdue University. He received a B.A. from the Integral Program at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA, and his M.A. in Philosophy is from Claremont Graduate University.

During the Spring 2018, he will teach an undergraduate seminar focusing on the role of fallibilism and experimental logic in insurrectionist resistance to oppression. He will also deliver two public lectures on the Queens and Staten Island Campuses:

Queens Campus

"Empathy or Insurrection: Boldly Confronting Oppression"

Monday, April 9, 2018

1:50 pm (Common Hour)

D'Angelo Center, Room 206

Staten Island Campus

"Empathy or Insurrection: Boldly Confronting Oppression"

Thursday, March 22, 2018

1:50 pm (Common Hour)

Kelleher Center, Kiernan Suite

For additional information, please contact Patricia Marchia at 718-990-6272 or [email protected].

Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.

Agnes M. Brazal

An associate professor of theology and research fellow at De la Salle University, Manila, Philippines, Agnes M. Brazal, S.T.L., S.T.D., has earned recognition as a prolific scholar in feminist and migration theological ethics and methods of doing intercultural and postcolonial theologies. She joins the Theology and Religious Studies faculty in St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences as the 2017 Peter and Margaret D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities at St. John’s University.

Brazal is past President and founding member of the DaKaTeo (Catholic Theological Society of the Philippines) and one of the first coordinators and "mothers" of the Ecclesia of Women in Asia, an association of Catholic women theologians in Asia. She has been a planning committee member of the Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church since 2007, and has served on the editorial board of Theological Studies, Asian Christian Review, and Budhi. In addition, Brazal is an international advisory board member for the publication, Louvain Studies.

The recipient of numerous honors, Brazal is a productive researcher. Her accolades include the 2003 MWI (Institute of Missiology, Missio, Aachen) prize for the international academic essay contest on Contextual Theology and Philosophy on the theme “Religious Identity and Migration,” and her book, Body and Sexuality, was a finalist in the 2007 National Book Award (Manila Critics Circle and the National Book Development Board). Her publications include: a co-authored volume, Intercultural Church: Bridge of Solidarity in the Migration Context

(Borderless Press, 2015); and co-edited volumes, Theology and Power (Paulist Press, 2016), Living with (out) Borders: Catholic Theological Ethics on the Migrations of Peoples (Orbis Books, 2016), The Second Plenary Council of the Philippines: Quo Vadis? (Ateneo de Manila   University Press, 2016), Church in the Age of Global Migration: A Moving Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Feminist Cyberethics in Asia: Religious Discourses on Human Connectivity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Transformative Theological Ethics: East Asian Contexts (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2010), Faith on the Move: Toward a Theology of Migration in Asia (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008), and Body and Sexuality: Theological-Pastoral Reflections of Women in Asia (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007). She has also published articles in journals such as Theological Studies, Concilium, Questions Liturgiques, Asian Christian Review, Asian Horizons, andHapag.

Brazal earned her bachelor’s degree from the Ateneo de Manila University and her S.T.L. /M.A. and S.T.D./Ph.D. from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.  She is teaching both an undergraduate and a graduate seminar on Migration: Theological and Ethical Challenges that will address the theological and ethical issues emerging from the phenomenon of human migration today. Brazal will also deliver two public lectures during the Spring 2017 semester.

Queens Campus
"Does Capitalism Kill? Critical Perspectives 50 Years after Populorum Progressio (Pope Paul VI’s Encyclical on the Development of Peoples).”
Thursday, March 30, 2017
1:50 pm (Common Hour)
D’Angelo Center, Room 206

Staten Island Campus
"Does Capitalism Kill? Critical Perspectives 50 Years after Populorum Progressio (Pope Paul VI’s Encyclical on the Development of Peoples).”
Monday, April 3, 2017
1:50 pm (Common Hour)
Kelleher Center, Kiernan Suite

For additional information, please contact Patricia Marchia at 718-990-6272  or [email protected].

Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.

Dr. LuMing Mao

A professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies and chair of the English department at Miami University, LuMing Mao, Ph.D., has earned recognition as a scholar-teacher of comparative rhetoric, cultural studies, and Asian/American rhetorics. He joins the English faculty in St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences as the 2016 Peter and Margaret D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities at St. John’s University.

Mao’s research has been centrally located in the intersectionalities of rhetoric, writing, linguistics, culture, history, and philosophy, and he has articulated a new kind of comparative rhetorical theory, one that enacts a discursive interdependence-in-difference. Mao’s work has both challenged Euro-American conceptions of Chinese and Asian/Asian American rhetorics and provided new methods of analysis for transforming dominant narratives of rhetoric in general and for depicting diverse rhetorical experiences of Chinese and Asian/Asian Americans in particular. His “art of recontextualization,” a method that relies on terms of interdependence and interconnectivity to constitute and regulate representation of all discursive practices, has contributed to a more dynamic, multidimensional understanding of the relationship between the local and the global, the self and the other, the digital and the alphabetic, and the cultural and the material. Mao currently is writing a book entitled Searching for a Tertium Quid: Studying Chinese Rhetoric in the Present and co-editing the Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing.

The recipient of numerous honors---including the Distinguished Scholar Award from Miami University in 2015 and the Honorable Mention for the MLA 2008 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for the co-edited volume Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric--- Mao is a prolific author. His most recent publications include: the Chinese edition of his Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: the Making of Chinese American Rhetoric (2013); an edited collection, Comparative Rhetoric: The Art of Traversing Rhetorical Times, Places, and Spaces (2014); essays in Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2013) and PMLA (2014); and a co-edited symposium on comparative rhetoric in Rhetoric Review (2015).

Mao earned his bachelor’s degree from East China Normal University and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He is teaching an undergraduate and a graduate seminar on Comparative Rhetoric: Re-Presenting the Other at St. John’s during the spring 2016 semester. He also will deliver these public lectures:

Queens Campus
“The Art of Recontextualization: Engaging the Rhetorics of the Other Comparatively”
Thursday, April 21, 2016
1:50 pm (Common Hour)
D’Angelo Center, Room 206

Staten Island Campus
“Images of Hybridity: Visualizing China through a Rhetoric of Becoming”
Monday, March 14, 2016
1:50 pm (Common Hour)
Kelleher Center, Kiernan Suite

For additional information, please contact Patricia Marchia at 718-990-6272 or [email protected].

Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.

Alice McDermott

A three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and National Book Award winner, author Alice McDermott has been named to the 2012 Peter and Margaret D’Angelo Endowed Chair in  the Humanities at St. John’s University.

Ms. McDermott is the second person named to the Chair, which was established in 2007 by Peter P. D’Angelo ‘78MBA, ‘06HON, and Margaret La Rosa D’Angelo ‘70Ed. The Chair brings leading authors, researchers and scholars from various disciplines to St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the University’s oldest division.

As Chair, Ms. McDermott will serve as a faculty member in the English Department from March 19 to April 27, 2012. In addition to meeting with students and professors, she will teach an intensive fiction-writing workshop for qualified undergraduates and will deliver two public lectures.

A celebrated author, Ms. McDermott currently serves as the Richard A. Macksey Professor for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Her latest novel, After This, was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. Her fifth novel, Child of My Heart, was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and was listed among Book Magazine’s “Ten Best Novels of 2002.”

Ms. McDermott’s novels include A Bigamist’s Daughter,  That Night — a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and At Weddings and Wakes, also nominated for a Pulitzer. In addition, Charming Billy won the 1988 National Book Award as well as the American Book Award.

Ms. McDermott also is the author of numerous articles and short stories, which have appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic and the New York Times.

John F. Haught, Ph.D.

A Distinguished Research Professor at Georgetown University, John F. Haught, Ph.D., is the first person named to the Peter and Margaret D’Angelo Endowed Chair in the Humanities at St. John’s University. Established in 2007 by Peter P. D’Angelo ‘78MBA, ‘06HON, and Margaret La Rosa D’Angelo ‘70Ed., the Chair brings leading authors, researchers and scholars from various disciplines to St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the University’s oldest division.

A recognized scholar in the fields of science and religion, Haught’s area of specialization is systematic theology, with a particular interest in issues pertaining to science, cosmology, evolution, ecology, and religion. He is the author of numerous books, including: Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science(Cambridge University Press, 2006); Purpose, Evolution, and the Meaning of Life(Pandora Press, 2004); Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospects for Religion in the Age of Evolution (Westview Press, 2003); and God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Westview Press, 2000; 2nd edition 2007). Haught has also authored numerous articles and reviews and has lectured internationally on many issues related to science and religion. He is the recipient of the Owen Garrigan Award in Science and Religion from Seton Hall University (2002), the Sophia Award for Theological Excellence from the Washington Theological Union (2004), and a Friend of Darwin Award from the National Center for Science Education (2008). Haught testified for the plaintiffs in the Harrisburg, PA “Intelligent Design trial” (Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Board of Education, 2005).

As the first person to hold the Peter and Margaret D’Angelo Endowed Chair for the Humanities at St. John’s, Haught will teach an undergraduate philosophy course, Science and Religion: A Philosophical Analysis, and deliver public lectures during the Fall 2008 semester.

Science, Religion, and the Quest for Cosmic Purpose

Thursday, October 16, 2008
4 p.m.
Bent Hall 277
Queens Campus

Science, Faith, and the New Atheism

Tuesday, November 18, 2008
7 p.m.
Kelleher Center - Kiernan Suite
Staten Island Campus

Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.