Mark T. Conard earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Temple University in Philadelphia. He was Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City; and then Dean of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Baltimore City Community College before joining EKU.

Mark’s current research interests are Plato and the philosophy of mathematics. Much of his past work was in the area of popular culture and philosophy. He was the general editor of a series on that topic at the University Press of Kentucky, which was comprised of more than thirty volumes, including his own works, The Philosophy of Film Noir, The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese, The Philosophy of The Coen Brothers, and The Philosophy of Spike Lee. He also writes suspense fiction, plays blues guitar, and does yoga obsessively.

Carolyn Renée Dupont is a professor in history at Eastern Kentucky University. Her research focuses on American religion and African American history. She is the author of Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975 and serves as the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Southern Religion. Distorting Democracy: The Forgotten History of the Elector College—and Why it Matters Today, her most recent book, was published in September 2024.

I was born and raised in southern California but spent several summers as a boy on a farm in Lincoln County, Kentucky, that’s been in my family for seven generations, and which it has fallen to me to take care of since coming to EKU in 1999. Since that time, I have taught 25 different courses here, mostly in the areas of philosophy and religious studies. These have included courses on world religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, as well as beginning philosophy, Greek and Roman philosophy, and modern philosophy, not to mention upper division electives on Hume and Kant, on Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, and on the thought of Charles Taylor. Over the years I have also co-taught, together with faculty from several different departments on campus, interdisciplinary seminars in the EKU Honors Program on topics as diverse as The Rediscovery of Antiquity in the Modern Age and Search for Self.

I am a historian of modern religious thought, which I conceive broadly to include powerful critiques of religion that have emerged since the Enlightenment; challenges to religious belief posed by the astounding growth of scientific and historical knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and by social dislocations resulting from industrialization, democratization, colonialism and globalization; as well as attempts on the part of major philosophers, theologians and social theorists to respond to these challenges, either by re-conceptualizing traditional religious categories, or else by proposing alternatives to them.

I earned a BA in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1990. After attending an Episcopal seminary affiliated with the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, for three semesters, and serving for one year as an intern at a parish in Inglewood, California, I received my MA (1997) and PhD (2000) in philosophy of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate School in southern California.

Just prior to my arrival at EKU, I spent two academic years (from 1997-1999) as a Fulbright scholar conducting doctoral research at the University of Marburg in Germany on an important figure in the newly emergent discipline of religious studies in the twentieth century named Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto, who was trained as a Protestant theologian, but also wrote books on Hinduism and travelled several times through Asia, is best remembered as the author of a classic book called The Idea of the Holy (1917). In it, he coined the term “numinous” to refer to the sort of experience of awe-inspiring mystery that he considered to be the essence of religion, and which he found expressed in a variety of forms in a wide and multicultural range of religious texts. Since the publication of my monograph, The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion (de Gruyter, 2000), I have on three occasions been invited to participate in academic conferences on Otto in both Germany and Italy and have published several book chapters on various aspects of his thought.

Over the past decade I have also published several book chapters and journal articles on the nineteenth-century philosophical critic of religion, Ludwig Feuerbach, and several related nineteenth-century figures, including Hegel, the Young Hegelians, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. These publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online), The Oxford History of Nineteenth-Century Germany Philosophy (2015), the Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2019), The Oxford History of Modern German Theology (forthcoming), and The Journal for the History of Modern Theology (de Gruyter).

From 2013-2018 I served as chair (or co-chair) of the Nineteenth-Century Theology Unit of the American Academy of Religion.

Dr. Groppo is historian of imperial Britain, with a special interest in medicine, aristocracy, philanthropy, and rural places in the 19th and 20th centuries. She earned undergraduate degrees in history and journalism at the University of Kentucky before pursuing her graduate studies at Princeton University, where she completed my PhD in history in September 2019.

Before coming to EKU, she was a visiting assistant professor at Berea College and a postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (Emory University). Her research has been supported by the University Center for Human Values (Princeton University), the Barbara Bates Center for the History of Nursing (University of Pennsylvania), the Canadian Association for the History of Nursing, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology.

Jackie Jay, Ph.D. (2008, University of Chicago), is a Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University. She is an Egyptologist who specializes in the literature, languages, and scripts of ancient Egypt.  She is the author of Orality and Literacy in the Demotic Tales (Brill, 2016) and co-author of The Archive of Thotsutmis, Son of Panouphis: Early Ptolemaic Ostraca from Deir el Bahari (O. Edgerton) (Chicago, 2021). Dr. Jay is currently completing a monograph on women in the ancient world, a project that arose as a direct extension of the classes on ancient women that she teaches at EKU.

Joshua A. Lynn is a historian of Civil War America. His research focuses on politics and culture, especially constructions of race, gender, and sexuality in nineteenth-century political culture and political thought.

Professor Lynn’s current book project, “The Black Douglass and the White Douglas,” uses the relationship between Frederick Douglass and Stephen A. Douglas to explore race, rights, and American identity before, during, and after the Civil War.

Professor Lynn also researches the history of monsters and horror and is working on a history of Gothic horror in 1950s and 1960s America, focusing on the career of Vincent Price.

He teaches courses on the Civil War, political culture, and the history of monsters and horror. He previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed his PhD, and Yale University.

Professor Lynn’s first book is Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism (UVA Press, 2019). His work has appeared in Civil War History, The Journal of the Early Republic, and the Tennessee Historical Quarterly. He won the Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2018. Professor Lynn shares his work through a variety of media, including public lectures, podcasts, radio, and television.

Laura Newhart is a Professor of Philosophy in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. Her areas of specialization are practical ethics, especially biomedical ethics, and social and political philosophy. Her current research interests include philosophy and popular culture, philosophy of mothering, philosophy for children, and philosophical counseling. She is a Certified Logic-Based Therapy and Consultation Consultant.

I teach a variety of courses in philosophy and in the Honors Program, as well as for the Animal Studies major (Animal Ethics) and the Environmental Sustainability and Stewardship minor (Environmental Ethics).

I have published articles on many topics in ethics, including papers on patience, courage, integrity, and tolerance, on animal and environmental ethics, and on the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche. See my Academia page for many of these works, as well as for select presentations and works in progress. My first book, On Patience, was published by Lexington Books in 2016, and is now available in paperback, too.

My current research and writing focuses on the myth of Sisyphus and the notions of meaning in life and the meaning of life. I am also co-editing an interdisciplinary collection of new essays on patience with the psychologist Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University).

I was born and raised in Tontitown, Arkansas. I earned three degrees from the University of Arkansas: B.A. English (Creative Writing Emphasis), magna cum laude, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy. I finally left my home state to teach for a year as a Temporary Visiting Assistant Professor at Truman State University (in Missouri) and came to EKU in August 2009.

Born in Saragossa, Spain, Dr. J. Abraham Vélez de Cea teaches Buddhism and World Religions at Eastern Kentucky University since 2006. Before joining EKU he taught Buddhist Ethics and Buddhist-Christian Mysticism in the department of theology at Georgetown University. He is active in the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, and the Buddhist Critical-Constructive Reflective Group of the American Academy of Religion.

He is interested in peace-building through interfaith dialogue, which he sees as a spiritual practice for everybody, not just scholars and representatives of religious communities. He believes that interreligious education, comparative theology, and interreligious studies are indispensable tools to foster mutual understanding and cooperation among people from diverse faiths.

He has published four books in Spanish and one in English, The Buddha and Religious Diversity (Routledge, 2013), which discusses the Buddha’s attitude towards religious diversity in conversation with Christian theology of religions. He has also published several articles about diverse aspects of early Buddhist thought and interreligious dialogue in peer-reviewed journals including Philosophy East & West, Sophia, Journal of Interreligious Dialogue, Buddhist Studies Review, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Journal of Buddhist-Christian Studies.

Rob Weise has taught History and Appalachian Studies at EKU for 25 years. He is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and holds a PhD from the University of Virginia. He currently lives on six acres of beautiful Kentucky countryside in eco-friendly housing, with one wife, one cat, three chickens, and various deer, coyotes, skunks, rabbits, raccoons, ticks, and chiggers.

Rob Weise studies the history of social and environmental landscapes in Eastern Kentucky. He is currently researching local and corporate land ownership patterns in the upper Kentucky River watershed, with particular attention to the holdings of the Fordson Coal Company on the Red Bird River in Clay and Leslie Counties. Some of that research is posted here. Select “Browse Exhibits.”

Bradford J. Wood is a Professor at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky where he has taught courses about Early America, the Atlantic World, the British Empire, and related topics since 2000. Wood is the author of This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775, which was published in 2004. This Remote Part of the World won the inaugural Hines Prize from the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World Program for the best first book in the program’s area of study and the Clarendon Award from the Lower Cape Fear Historical Society for outstanding contributions to the study of the region’s history. With Michelle LeMaster, he is co-editor of Creating and Contesting Carolina: Proprietary Era Histories, which was published in 2013.  He has also published articles and essays on the Carolinas during the eighteenth century and many book reviews. He was born in Charleston, West Virginia and grew up in southeastern Michigan.