Professor Samuel Moyn, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law and History at Harvard University, is the guest scholar of the 2017 Week of Jewish Philosophy, the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver have announced.

This year’s public panel discussion, “Religion and Human Rights After the 2016 Election,” will take place Thursday, April 6, at 6 p.m. in Eaton Humanities 250, 1610 Pleasant Street, on the CU Boulder campus. RSVPs, which are appreciated as space is limited, can be made by emailing CUJewishStudies@colorado.edu or calling 303-492-7143.

Moyn will join an interdisciplinary panel of CU Boulder and DU faculty to reflect on the fraught history – and uncertain future – of religion and human rights.

In addition to Moyn, panelists will include Professors Greg Johnson (religious studies, CU Boulder), Susan Kent (history, CU Boulder), Carl Raschke (religious studies, DU), and Joshua Wilson (political science, DU). The panel will consider questions such as the following:

What will the future of human rights look like after the 2016 election? How have religious traditions shaped our thinking about human dignity and democracy in the past, and how might the relationship between religion and human rights change in a time marked by developments such as populist movements, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump?

Moyn received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000 and a law degree from Harvard University in 2001. He has written several books on European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2010), and edited a number of others. His new book, based on the Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, is Christian Human Rights (2015).

In addition to the public panel, Moyn will present graduate and faculty seminars at both DU and CU Boulder.

Moyn’s visit marks the third annual Week of Jewish Philosophy, a joint initiative presented by DU’s Center for Judaic Studies and CU’s Program in Jewish Studies. This year’s programs are cosponsored by the DU-Iliff Joint Doctoral Program in the Study of Religion, DU’s Department of Philosophy, and CU’s Department of Religious Studies.

For more information visit Colorado.edu/JewishStudies.