February Faculty Update
Mike Ashfield, Chad Ford, Rachel Robison-Greene, and Patrick Mason were awarded a little over $10,000 for a GPR2 Public Engagement and Impact grant for funding public-facing global philosophy of religion programming.
Mike Ashfield, Rachel Robison-Greene, Patrick Mason, and Michael Otteson were awarded $1,000 from the American Philosophical Association’s Berry Fund for Public Philosophy. The funds from this grant will be used to organize a public-facing panel at the Logan Tabernacle on the question of philosophy’s compatibility with the LDS faith.
Mustafa Banister published “Across Sea and Ocean: Transmitting and Receiving Caliphal Sovereignty Claims between the Late Medieval Cairo Sultanate and the Sultanates of India” in the Journal of Middle East Medievalists in a special dossier issue on the Indian Ocean world. Banister also published “’Knowledge of the Three Shone in One’: Contextualizing al-Sakhāwī’s Perceptions of Islamicate Trilingualism in the Ḍawʾ al-Lāmiʿ” in the Mamlūk Studies Review.
John Crow’s book, co-authored with Elizabeth J. Harris, The Life of Allan Bennett, Bhikkhu Ananda Metteyya was published by Equinox Publishing Ltd in 2025.
Mark Damen was recently announced as the Norm Jones Faculty Fellow for 2026. Damen received $4,000 in recognition of his work and will hold the title “Norm Jones Faculty Fellow” for the 2026 calendar year.
Chad Ford was interviewed for a Salt Lake Tribune article by Gordon Monson that discusses Ford’s journey from sports writer to professor at USU.
Rachel Robison-Greene’s op-ed, “The Temptations of Nostalgia” in 3 Quarks Daily was recognized by the American Philosophical Association as a winner of their Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest in 2025.
Rachel Robison-Greene, Charlie Huenemann, and Michael Otteson were invited to talk on UPR’s “Access Utah” segment with Tom Williams about World Philosophy Day in November, 2025. You can listen to the segment here.
Amanda Katz, currently in Greece as a Fulbright U.S. Visiting scholar, will be delivering the keynote address for their 4-day symposium Freedom 250 Seminar: Celebrating 250 years of United States Independence: historic Ties and Democratic Bonds with Greece in Athens.
Colleen O’Neill’s book Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century was published by The University of North Carolina Press in February, 2026.
James Sanders recently published an essay titled, “`The World Has Celebrated’: The 1860s as Turning Point in the Global History of Colonialism, Republicanism, and Democracy,” in the book Transatlantic Monarchisms in the Americas and Europe, 1812-1868, edited by Rodrigo Escribano Roca and Rebeca Viñuela Pérez.
Susan Shapiro co-edited a special issue (33.2) of Mediterranean Studies, titled “Human Rights as a Developing Concept in the Mediterranean.” Shapiro wrote the Introduction to the issue, and one of the articles, “The Foundations of Human Rights in Ancient Greek Thought,” as well as co-writing the editors’ Introduction.
Dominic Sur was invited to give a talk about his current research at the annual conference organized by the Tsadra Foundation. Sur’s talk, entitled “Old School (nyingma) Philosophical Vajrayāna,” on November 12th, discussed his ongoing work documenting Tibetan innovation and developments in the history of Buddhist philosophy.