Upcoming Events, 2026-27
All presentations will take place in the Robinson Teaching Theatre at 4 p.m. unless otherwise noted.
Oct. 22, 2026: "On Flourishing in the Age of AI" with Meghan Sullivan 鈥� Cowles Auditorium
Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She serves as director of the University-Wide Ethics Initiative and is the founding director of Notre Dame鈥檚 Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. The university hub for research and teaching in ethics, the Institute includes the new Rev. John I. Jenkins, CSC, Center for Virtue Ethics and the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab. Sullivan has been honored with one of Notre Dame鈥檚 Joyce Awards for Teaching, with the Provost鈥檚 All-Faculty Team Award and with the City of South Bend鈥檚 40 Under 40 Award. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia (B.A. in philosophy & politics, highest distinction), Oxford (B.Phil.) and Rutgers (Ph.D.), and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (Balliol College).
Nov. 6, 2026: "On Friendship in a Polarized Society" with Cornel West & Robert George
Cornel West, Ph.D. is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought and a wide range of subjects 鈥� including but by no means limited to the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature and music. West is the former professor of the practice of public philosophy at Harvard University and professor emeritus at Princeton University. West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at 19th and 20th-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.
Robert P. George, D.Phil. is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that, on the President鈥檚 Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO鈥檚 World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds J.D. and MTS. degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., BCL, DCL and D.Litt. from Oxford University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Feb. 25, 2027: "On the American Founding" with Ronald Johnson
Ronald Angelo Johnson is the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University. His latest book Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution, published in 2025 by Cornell University Press, is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution, which brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Haiti allying against European tyranny. Entangled Alliances has received the Texas Institute of Letters Honor Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award. Johnson is currently working on the book We Are All Equal: Turmoil and Triumph in the Early United States and Revolutionary Haiti (under contract with Princeton University Press), a diplomatic history of race and revolution, illustrating that Americans and Haitians shared important understandings of liberty. His first book was Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance, and he is the co-editor (with Ousmane Power-Greene) of the book In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.
April 7, 2027: "On Disability, Design and Faith" with Sara Hendren
Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer and professor at Northeastern University. Her book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World explores the places where disability shows up in design at all scales: assistive technology, furniture, architecture, urban planning and more. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won the 2021 Science in Society Journalism book prize. Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama presidency; at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Museum and many others; and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. Her first short documentary film Simple Machine will play at festivals in the U.S. and abroad throughout 2025. She has been an NEH Public Scholar and a fellow at New America, and her commentary and criticism have been published in 贬补谤辫别谤鈥檚, Art in America, The New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere.