Center for the Humanities to present Celebrating Our Books, Recognizing Our Authors Dec. 7

Larry May, Ph.D., professor of philosophy in Arts & Sciences, will deliver a keynote address on “The Moral Writer” as part of Celebrating Our Books, Recognizing Our Authors, Washington University’s fourth annual faculty book colloquium, at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 7, in the Ann W. Olin Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

Celebrating Our Books honors the work of scholars from across the arts and sciences disciplines. Featured faculty presenters — who will read from their works and take questions from the audience — are Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., associate professor of education in Arts & Sciences, most recently the author of Social Emergence: Societies As Complex Systems (2005); and Rebecca Lester, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, author of Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent (2005).

In addition, Carter Revard, professor emeritus of English in Arts & Sciences, will read three poems from his latest collection, How the Songs Come Down (2005).

Celebrating Our Books is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences. The Ann W. Olin Women’s Building is located just north of Olin Library on the university’s Hilltop Campus. Seating is extremely limited. For more information or to RSVP, call (314) 935-5576.

In conjunction with the event, the Washington University Campus Store will display books by colloquium participants, all of which will be available for purchase. Authors will be available after the colloquium to sign their works.

May — who holds a law degree in addition to a doctorate in philosophy — is the author of The Morality of Groups (1987), Sharing Responsibility (1992), The Socially Responsive Self (1996), Masculinity and Morality (1998) and Crimes Against Humanity (2005). The latter volume is the first in a proposed trilogy on the normative foundations of international criminal law. The second in third volumes, now in various stages of draft, are War Crimes and Just Wars and Crimes Against Peace and Waging Aggressive War.

Lester’s Jesus in Our Wombs takes readers behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants — young women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester, who conducted 18 months of fieldwork in the convent, provides a rich ethnography of these young women’s journeys as they wrestle with doubts, fears, ambitions and setbacks in their struggle to follow what they believe to be the will of God.

Sawyer is the author or editor of six books, including Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation (2002) and Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration (2003). In Social Emergence, he compares relationships between the individual and the group to complex systems in computer science, physics, biology and other disciplines. His studies reveal that creativity and improvisation are key aspects of social emergence, and that creative groups display emergent properties that cannot be understood through psychological analysis of the participating individuals.

Revard, in addition to How the Songs Come Down, is the author of Ponca War Dancers (1980), Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992), An Eagle Nation (1993), Family Matters, Tribal Affairs (1998) and Winning the Dust Bowl (2001). Earlier this year he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.