Speakers

Elof Axel Carlson is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Stony Brook University. He is a geneticist and historian of science. Carlson’s book The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001) explores the relation of degeneracy theory to the formation of the eugenics movement culminating in the Holocaust. He is the author of ten books and for the past 12 years has contributed a biweekly column, "Life Lines," to several North Shore Long Island newspapers.
Dr. Richard N. Fine is a nationally renowned pediatric nephrologist, past president of the American Society of Transplantation, and Editor-in-Chief of Pediatric Transplantation. Dr. Fine is Dean of the School of Medicine of Stony Brook University, as well as Distinguished Service Professor. Throughout his remarkable career, Dr. Fine has maintained a deep interest in professional ethics and the teaching of humanistic perspectives to medical students.
Robert Goldenberg, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, holds degrees from Cornell and Brown Universities as well as from the Jewish Theological Seminary; the current year marks his 30th at Stony Brook University. A noted scholar of ancient Judaism, Dr. Goldenberg teaches courses on Jewish history, Jewish thought (early and modern), and the ancient Greeks and Romans, and recently published The Origins of Judaism with Cambridge University Press. He has published on many aspects of Jewish life and thought, including The Nations That Know Thee Not: Ancient Jewish Attitudes toward Other Religions (1998), a book-length study of ancient Jewish attitudes toward the religions of other people, and a seminal 1982 article on “Early Rabbinic Explanations of the Destruction of Jerusalem.”
Eva Feder Kittay is Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. Major publications include “At the Margins of Moral Personhood” (Ethics); Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency; Blackwell Studies in Feminist Philosophy (1998, with L. Alcoff); Theoretical Perspectives on Dependency and Women (2002, with E. Feder); Women and Moral Theory (1987, with D. T. Meyers), Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (1990); and Frames, Fields and Contrasts (ed. 1992, with A. Lehrer). She is working on three books, one tentatively entitled A Quest for A Humbler Philosophy: Thinking about Disabled Minds and Things that Matter; the other, a collection of her essays on ethics of care; and the third, a collection of essays entitled Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy (with Licia Carlson). She is the mother of two adult children, one of whom has significant cognitive impairments. She is also the daughter of two holocaust survivors.
Kraig Larkin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Stony Brook University. His dissertation, “‘The Taste of the Great Wide World’: The Cigarette, Public Health, and Consumer Culture From the Third Reich to the Federal Republic,” examines the intersection of public health and consumption in Germany since the Third Reich. He has received research grants from the DAAD, German Historical Institute, Duke University and the Truman Library.
Sara Lipton is Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Stony Brook University. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations and religious identity in the Middle Ages. She is author of Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (1999) and Dark Mirror: Jews, Vision, and Witness in Medieval Christian Art (Metropolitan Books, forthcoming).
Stephen G. Post , Ph.D. is Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University School of Medicine. He is Editor-in-Chief of the definitive five-volume Encyclopedia of Bioethics (2004), and has directed research projects on posthumanism and ethics with support from the National Institute of Health.
Dr. Fred Rosner, Professor of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, is among the leading experts on medicine and medical ethics in the world. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Medical Association’s Award for “Leadership in Ethics and Professionalism,” and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists. He is an international authority on Jewish medical ethics, and author of nine widely acclaimed books in this field. Dr. Rosner is also translator and editor of Moses Maimonides’ medical writings (seven volumes), and is recognized as the foremost international authority on this aspect of Maimonides work. His works such as Biblical and Talmudic Medicine (1993) and Modern Medicine and Jewish Ethics (1991) are considered classics. Dr. Rosner lived in Berlin during the 1930s, and is able to bring his memories of that era to a deep reflection on the meaning of the Holocaust.
Stephen Spector took his Ph.D. at Yale and is Chairman of the English Department at Stony Brook. He is a specialist in the Bible and its role in Christian and Jewish identity and relations. He is the author of six books, the most recent of which is Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism (2008). Spector has received numerous fellowships and grants, as well as prizes from the Medieval Academy of America and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. He has held research fellowship appointments at the National Humanities Center and Wesleyan University's Center for Humanities, and has been Visiting Professor at Hebrew University.