The Department of French and Italian sponsored a public lecture by
Professor Vincent Pecora (Chair, Department of English, University of Utah) on April 5, 2012.

"Secularization without End: Modernity and Religion" 

Thursday, April 5, 4 pm, in the McCune Conference Room (6020 HSSB, in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center).

Vincent P. Pecora teaches currently at the University of Utah, where he holds the Gordon B. Hinckley Chair in British Literature and Culture. He has taught at the University of Arkansas (1984-85), the University of California, Los Angeles (1985-2005), and has directed summer seminars for the School of Criticism and Theory (2002) and the Social Science Research Council (2010). He works primarily in the areas of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, critical theory and intellectual history, and most recently on the question of secularization in modernity. His work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese. Prof. Pecora is the author of SELF AND FORM IN MODERN NARRATIVE (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), HOUSEHOLDS OF THE SOUL (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), SECULARIZATION AND CULTURAL CRITICISM: RELIGION, NATION, AND MODERNITY (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and he is the editor of NATIONS AND IDENTITIES: CLASSIC READINGS (Blackwell Publishers, 2001). His current project is a book entitled "Secularization without End: Modernity and the Vicissitudes of Religion." The argument of the book, which is in many ways a sequel to his earlier 2006 volume, is that the “common sense” secular ideal represented by the complete translation of religious truths into secular ones is in all likelihood an impossible and, perhaps, an undesirable goal.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies, COMMA and the IHC.