|
James Davison Hunter is LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia. He completed his doctorate at Rutgers University in 1981 and joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1983.
Mr. Hunter has written eight books and a wide range of essays, articles, and reviews, all variously concerned with the problem of meaning and moral order in a time of political and cultural change in American life. In 1988 he received the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion for Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation. In 1991 he was the recipient of the Gustavus Myers Award for the Study of Human Rights for Articles of Faith; Articles of Peace. The Los Angeles Times named Mr. Hunter as a finalist for their 1992 Book Prize for Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. In 2004, he was appointed by the White House to a six-year term at the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2005, he won the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters.
Over the years, Professor Hunter’s research findings have been presented to audiences on National Public Radio and C-Span, at the National Endowment for the Arts, and at dozens of colleges and universities around the country. He also has been a consultant to the White House, the Bicentennial Commission for the U.S. Constitution, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the National Commission on Civic Renewal.
Joseph E. Davis is Research Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. His research centers on questions of self and morality, psychiatric classification and medicalization, narrative and bioethics. He is the author of Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self, which was the co-winner of the 2006 Cooley Award given by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and editor of Identity and Social Change and Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements. His articles on issues of identity, victimization, technology, memory, and narrative have appeared in books and journals such as Qualitative Sociology, Social Problems, Society, and The Hedgehog Review. Professor Davis is currently working on research projects dealing with suffering and narrative, medicalization and psychopharmacology, and enhancement technologies and the self.
Jennifer L. Geddes is Research Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Her areas of research include evil and suffering, the Holocaust, ethics and fiction, critical theory, twentieth-century literature, and religion and culture. She is the Editor of The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, the Institute’s award-winning journal; editor of Evil After Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, Ethics; and the author of several articles, book chapters, reviews, and interviews. Professor Geddes was the 2005–06 Emilia Galla Struppa Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and is currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she is working on a book entitled The Rhetorics of Evil, which explores the ways in which perpetrators, victims, witnesses, and scholars speak about and narrate evil.
 SLAVICA JAKELIĆ
Associate Director
Slavica Jakelić is Research Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and Co-Director of the Center on Religion and Democracy. Her work explores the importance of religion for people’s collective identities and the role of religion and religious institutions in the shaping of social order and social change. She is a co-editor of two volumes, The Future of the Study of Religion and Crossing Boundaries: From Syria to Slovakia, as well as a co-editor of The Hedgehog Review’s issue “After Secularization.” She has written for both academic and broader audiences on theories of religion, the public role of religions in modern societies, secularization and secularism, religion and violence, and religious dialogue. Professor Jakelić is presently working on a book entitled Religion as Identity: The Challenge of Collectivistic Religion in the Contemporary World, which explores the institutional roles and symbolic meanings of religion in collective identification.
 JOSHUA J. YATES
Associate Director
Joshua J. Yates is Research Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and directs the Institute’s Program on Global Culture. Focusing on the cultural dimensions of contemporary globalization, he is especially interested in various social and institutional forces and movements working for the implementation, integration, and reformation of the “good world.” Professor Yates has written on the cosmopolitanism of American global elites, the challenges of a globalizing modernity to orthodox religion, the worldwide spread of democracy, and the anti-globalization/global justice movement. He is presently working on a book about the world-cultural significance of modern humanitarian organizations.
Professor Yates is the principal writer for The Great Democratic Revolution, a documentary film series that was awarded a scripting grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also associate producer for the documentary film project Faith in the Hood and the principle investigator for the Thrift and American Culture Project.
 KRISTINE HARMON
Assistant Director of Publications
Before joining IASC and The Hedgehog Review staff, Ms. Harmon worked in fields as varied as non-profit arts administration, rare book sales, food service, childcare, academic research, and publishing. She moved to Charlottesville after receiving a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University, and in 2005 founded an independent film production company, Dakota Road Productions, which she manages in her spare time. |
