Reza Aslan, Kevin Boyle, Mark Danner and Carol Jacobsen will deliver keynote speeches at the Humanities Center Fellows Conference, 9:00 a.m. to 5:20 p.m., Friday, Nov., 18, 2005. The Conference, free and open to the public, will be held in the McGregor Memorial Conference Center on the WSU campus.

Aslan, pursuing a doctorate in the history of religions also studied Theology at Harvard. He taught Islamic and Middle East Studies at the University of Iowa and fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was a legislative assistant for the Friends’ Committee on National Legislation, and was elected president of Harvard’s Chapter of the United Nations World Conference on Religion and Peace. His first book No God but God (2005) is a critically acclaimed history of the Islamic religion.

Boyle wrote Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004), which won the National Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Book Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Arc of Justice was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Boyle has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He also held a chair in American History at University College Dublin, Ireland. He serves on the advisory board for the Walter P. Reuther Library at WSU.

Danner has written on politics and foreign policy for over two decades. He is professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and Henry R. Luce professor of Human Rights, Democracy and Journalism at Bard College. He has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, and Iraq and the Middle East. Danner is the author Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (2004), as well as forthcoming books on the former Yugoslavia and Haiti. Danner has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1990, and he contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books. Danner\'s work has appeared in Harper\'s, The New York Times, Aperture and many other newspapers and magazines. He has co-written and co-produced documentaries for the ABC News program Peter Jennings Reporting, and his work has received, a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards and an Emmy. Danner was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1999. Danner lectures widely and recently appeared on the Charlie Rose Show (PBS).

Jacobsen, an associate professor of Video at the University of Michigan, is an award winning social documentary artist whose works in video and photography address issues of women’s criminalization and censorship. Her videos of women\'s first person stories serving life sentences for killing an abusive partner "From One Prison" and "Sentenced" and worked with the ACLU Clemency Project. Her video "Bound and Gagged" exposed the torture of women in U.S. prisons . Jacobsen\'s work has been shown at Lincoln Center, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Cultural Contemporanea, Barcelona; Kunstforum, Bonn; Brussels International Film Festival; Temple Gallery, Rome; and Beijing, China. She received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Paul Robeson Foundation, Center for New Television, Women in Film Foundation, Art Matters, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Michigan Women’s Foundation.

Five Wayne State faculty will address the conference: Ellen Barton (Linguistics) and Ken Jackson (English) will speak on “Hoping against Hope in the Discourse of Medicine;” Joseph Fitzgerald (Psychology) will speak on “Emotional Expression in Autobiographical Memory;” Donald Haase (German and Slavic Studies) will speak on “Fairy Tales, Hope, and the Culture of Defeat from the Postbellum South to Postwar Germany;” and Kirsten Thompson (Film Studies – English) will speak on “Dread and American Cinema at the turn of the century.”

For more information please call the Humanities Center at (313) 577-5471 or visit the conference web site, http://www.research.wayne.edu/hum/symposia/05.html.