The Common Hour

Fall Semester Speakers:

Amy Ensley
Director of the Hankey Center for the History of Women’s Education

Amy Ensley is Wilson College’s Director of the Hankey Center for the History of Women’s Education. Her research interests include women’s history in the United States during the post-Civil War era through the Women’s Rights Movement of the 1970s. Her focus includes women’s education, roles in the workforce, wartime, religion, and social activism, and work/life balance. She uses Digital Humanities techniques to analyze and communicate historical information from the college archives and oral history interviewing to preserve the history of alumnae and faculty of the college.

 

Robert P. Jones
Author of The End of White Christian America

Robert P. Jones is the founding CEO of PRRI and a leading scholar and commentator on religion and politics. He is the author of The End of White Christian America, two other books, and numerous peer-review articles on religion and public policy. Jones writes a column for The Atlantic online on politics and culture and appears regularly on Interfaith Voices, the nation’s leading religion news-magazine on public radio. He is frequently featured in major national media such as MSNBC, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. 

 

Jim Condron
Artist of the Undefinable

Originally from Long Island, NY and Connecticut, Jim Condron earned his MFA at the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (2004) and a BA in Art and English from Colby College, Waterville, ME (1992). He also studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (1993-'95). Since 1993, Condron has studied with Rohini Ralby, the artist's mentor. His work appears nationally and internationally in galleries and museums as well as incorporate, university, public and private collections.

Condron’s pieces express humor, absurdity and beauty through the combination and interaction of everyday objects, castoff remnants and paint. Each piece is titled with a textual fragment from a story that intends to add to the work’s rhetoric rather than naming or defining it. Titles are applied to the pieces the same way Condron assembles materials and are appropriated from literature by an array of great authors such as Don DeLillo, James Salter, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Oscar Wilde, Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemmingway, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and others.
 

 

Vincent Lloyd
Author of Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons 

Vincent Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, and Global Interdisciplinary Studies, at Villanova University, where he also directs the Africana Studies Program. Lloyd co-edits, with David True, the journal Political Theology, and he directs the Villanova Political Theology Project. His books include Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons, co-authored with Joshua Dubler; In Defense of Charisma; Black Natural Law; and the co-edited Anti-Blackness and Christian Ethics. Lloyd lives in Philadelphia with his partner, six-year-old daughter, and pitbull.

 

 

Robin Fretwell Wilson
Legal scholar and Founder of Tolerance Means Dialogues 

Robin Fretwell Wilson is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Public Engagement at the University of Illinois College of Law and Director and Founder of the Tolerance Means Dialogues, dialogues around the country aimed at harnessing the insights of Millennials about how to bridge difference in our society over issues that have divided us, like gay rights—with the goal being that every voice is heard. She is the author of eleven books, including Religious Freedom, LGBT Rights, and the Prospects for Common Ground (William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Robin Fretwell Wilson, eds.) Professor Wilson has worked extensively on state law reform. In 2007, she received the Citizen’s Legislative Award for her work on changing Virginia’s informed consent law. In 2015, she assisted the Utah Legislature to enact the Utah Compromise, balancing LGBT rights with religious liberty protections for traditional marriage.  She directs the Fairness for All Initiative at UoI, an Initiative funded in part by the Templeton Religion Trust, which hopes to provide other proofs-of-principle in state law that gay rights and religious liberty need not be in tension.A member of the American Law Institute, her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

 

June Eric-Udorie 
Named “Female Activist of the Year,” by Elle in 2017

After witnessing her work with the UK government on policy and campaigns to end female genital mutilation and child marriage, Prime Minister David Cameron invited June Eric-Udorie to be part of a 2014 youth steering committee to address these issues. That year, she co-founded Youth for Change, an initiative working to end violence against women in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and the UK. In 2015, she successfully developed and executed a campaign that overturned the British government’s decision to remove feminism from a nationally-mandated high school curriculum. Recently, Eric-Udorie raised enough funds in a week to take 450 underprivileged girls of color to see the film Hidden Figures, underlining her commitment to the importance of representation.
As a speaker, Eric-Udorie is unafraid to challenge her audiences, encouraging them to confront difficult truths and imagine a more equal future. Her informative, accessible, and inspiring talks encourage feminists to help turn the movement into an intersectional cause that fights for true equality while celebrating our differences.
Eric-Udorie’s activism led ElleUK to name her “Female Activist of the Year” for 2017. She writes frequently for publications such as The Guardian, Fusion, The Independent, and more. Most recently, Eric-Udorie served as the editor for the collection Can We All Be Feminists?, a series of essays by notable feminist writers, including Brit Bennett, that explores the nuances of identity and the capacity of the modern feminist movement to both empower and exclude. Eric-Udorie is currently studying at Duke University, where she is a Human Rights Scholar at the Kenan Institute of Ethics.
Sponsored by the Diversity Team
 

 Megan Mizanty 
Choreographer and Dancer

Megan Mizanty is the artistic director of MizantyMoves Dance Works.  Her dances bridge live sound with movement, entangling these disciplines with collaboration at its heart. The company is currently composed of New York-based dancers Larissa Asebedo, Joan Bradford, Kailey McCrudden and Madi McGain. Megan is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Wilson College. She has performed internationally with Project Trans(m)it, producing two dance film festivals, in London and Philadelphia.  Megan has danced with companies in New York and Philadelphia, including Birds on a Wire Dance Theatre, Improbable Stage Productions, LINKED dance-theatre and toured with Matthew Frazier-Smith Dance. She received a BA in English Literature from Ithaca College and an MFA in Dance from Temple University. Megan was a Dance in Leadership recipient from Dance/USA, awarded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, as well as the Linda Rolfe New Writer's Prize recipient from Routledge Publications.  Her past choreography has been described as "[I]ntriguing, fresh and unpredictable" (Times Union Review) with "[B]eautiful singers and fully invested dancers" (Critical Dance).
 

 

Aakash Singh Rathore 
Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study

Aakash Singh Rathore is a philosopher of international repute and also India’s number 3 Ironman triathlete. His 20 published books — including his latest, A Philosophy of Autobiography: Body & Text — range in subject from political philosophy, law, and religion to literature, sports, and wine. Aakash also curates a popular Quora space, Mind & Muscle, with daily posts on the challenges of unifying intellectual and physical virtues. 

 

 

Kait Parker 
The host of the “Warming Signs” Podcast, Weather Channel 

Kait Parker is an atmospheric scientist that has studied and covered every major US storm on-air for the last decade. Before joining The Weather Channel digital team, she hosted America's Morning Headquarters on The Weather Channel and regularly appeared on Good Morning America. Additionally, she has worked as a meteorologist in West Palm Beach, Florida and Montgomery, Alabama. A graduate of the University of Missouri with a degree in Environmental and Atmospheric Science, she has also been an instructor for a graduate-level course on Climate and an undergraduate course on Storm Chasing.