Presidential Lecture "Thinking About Blasphemy and Secular Criticism" by Talal Asad October 9, 2006

City University of New York, Graduate Center University Distinguished Professor in Anthropology Talal Asad will deliver the first lecture in the 2006-2007 Presidential and Endowed Lectures in the Humanities and Arts Series. His lecture is entitled "Thinking About Blasphemy and Secular Criticism." A lecture discussion will take place at the Stanford Humanities Center the following day at 4:00 p.m.

Professor Asad has delivered the Wellek Library Lectures at the Critical Theory Institute at UC Irvine, as well as the First Rappaport Annual Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology of Religion, American Anthropological Association. He has been Chair of the Anthropology Department, The Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research, and is currently an associate member of of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Amsterdam.

Professor Asad's publications include "Formations of the Secular" (2003), which has been translated in Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, and Hebrew. He has also written "Genealogies of Religion" (1993), and is currently preparing "Thinking About Suicide Bombing." His most recent article is "Explaining the Global Religious Revival: The Egyptian Case" in G. Ter Haar (ed.) Global Religions and the Modern World.

Free and open to the public.

Official Website: http://shc.stanford.edu