Dr. Sideris’s research focuses broadly on the ethical significance of natural processes, and the way in which “environmental” values are captured, or obscured, by narratives and perspectives from religion and the sciences. Her recent research examines the role of wonder in contemporary scientific discourse and its impact on how humans conceive of and relate to nature. She is especially interested in the mythic, religious, and ethical dimensions of the so-called Anthropocene and its attendant technologies, such as geoengineering and de-extinction. The overarching question that drives her research is how to articulate a vision of the human that is appropriate to the environmental challenges we collectively face. She is actively involved in a number of international research initiatives in the environmental humanities, and serves as President-Elect of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.  She is author of Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection, and Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World, and co-editor of a collection of interdisciplinary essays on the life and work of environmental pioneer Rachel Carson, titled Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge.

Jamie Kreiner is Professor in the History Department at the University of Georgia.  Her most recent book is Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West, which won the George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History, 2021, for the best book in environmental history.  She has also won the William Koren, Jr. Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Wayne D. Rasmussen Award from the Agricultural History Society.   She is one of the co-authors of the article “The Environmental History of the Late Antique West: A Bibliographic Essay” (2018).  Among the undergraduate seminars she has taught are “The Animal and the Human in the Middle Ages”, “Economy and Society before Capitalism”, and “The Medieval Mind: Cognition, Media Culture, Ethics”.  She is a member of “Dirty History”, an interdisciplinary workshop in agriculture, environment, and capitalism.

Please register for this event!  It's free!  You can register at https://uky.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bR33A2dnRD6B4Yf4D9Zb6Q

This is the first lecture in the mini-series sponsored by World Religions on "Religion and the Environment".

Julia Watts Belser is an associate professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University and core faculty in Georgetown's Disability Studies Program, as well as a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center.  She is the author of Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2018). She has held faculty fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  She currently directs an initiative on disability and climate change, which brings together disability activists, artists, policy makers, and academics to address how disability communities are disproportionately affected by environmental risk and climate disruption.