PBK Visiting Scholars

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Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program  

Since 1957, the Society's Visiting Scholar Program has been offering undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America's most distinguished scholars. The purpose of the program is to contribute to the intellectual life of the campus by making possible an exchange of ideas between the Visiting Scholars and the resident faculty and students. They meet informally with students and faculty members, participate in classroom discussions and seminars, and give a public lecture open to the entire academic community. The visits are designed primarily for undergraduate participation. 

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Past Visiting Scholars:

Spring 2022

Howard Bloch, Sterling Professor of French, Yale University

R. Howard Bloch is a graduate of Amherst College and Stanford University, Professor Bloch has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of California at Berkeley, and Columbia University.  He has published numerous books and articles on medieval and modern French literature, history, and visual culture: Medieval French Literature and Law; Etymologies and Genealogies: An Anthropology of the French Middle Ages; The Scandal of the Fabliaux; Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love; God’s Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne; The Anonymous Marie de France; A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry; and One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made us Modern. Professor Bloch is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. 

Gothic Cathedrals and State Building in the High Middle Ages, PBK Visiting Lecture, March 3, 2022 4:10 PM
Access the recording 

A consideration of the relationship between the construction of the major French Gothic cathedrals—Saint-Denis, Notre-Dame Paris, Chartres, Amiens, Reims, the Sainte Chapelle—and the consolidation of monarchy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Concentration upon crusade as a driving force of royal unity, cathedral building as an engine for the rise of cities; representations of kingship in the sculpture and stained glass of major churches; the use of religious imagery from the Hebrew and Christian bibles in the affirmation of political legitimacy; the cathedral building site as a forum for social integration; the alliance of the bishop’s cathedral and the king’s justice; the use of ritual for the performance of statehood; and, finally, the restoration of cathedrals after the French Revolution as part of the building of national unity and identity in the nineteenth century. A presentation highly saturated with images.

Spring 2021

Richard Prum
Yale University, William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Curator of Ornithology and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
"The Evolution of Beauty"

In this lecture, Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum describes how mating preferences--what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"--create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world. In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? This lecture presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves. The Evolution of Beauty, recorded 26 Feb, 2021 (video)

Fall 2019

Richard Alley
Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University
"Two-Mile Time Machines: Ice cores and abrupt climate change"

Fall 2018

Dava Newman
Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT, and a Harvard-MIT Health, Sciences, and Technology faculty member
"Exploring Space for Earth: Earth's Vital Signs revealed"

Fall 2017

Stephen Walt
Professor of International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
"U.S. Foreign Policy Today and in the Future"
Wyoming Public Media Interview - "America's Place on the World Stage"

Fall 2015

Hazel Carby
Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies and director of the Initiative on Race, Gender, and Globalization, Yale
"Black Futurities: Shape-Shifting Beyond the Limits of the Human"

Spring 2015

Kathleen McGarry
Professor of Economics, UCLA
"50 Years of the War on Poverty: What it Meant for the Elderly"

Spring 2014

Christine M. Thomas, Professor of Religious Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
"Finding Paul in the Landscape of the Ancient City: Urban Space at Ephesos, Real and Imagined"

Fall 2012

Tyler Burge, Professor of Philosophy, UCLA
Perception: Origins of Mind

Fall 2010

Dr. Jack Goldstone
Global Population Trends and How They Shape Our Future

Highlights in the History of the PBK Visiting Scholar Program at the University of Wyoming

1957	Program is Initiated by PBK National Office
1959	Thomas Swain Barclay, Department of Political Science, Stanford University-16 April 1959
1960	Ernest Simmons, Departments of Russian Literature and Slavic Languages, Columbia University-12 April 1960
1961	Peter Odegard, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley-27 March
1962	Lewis Hanke, Department of Latin American Studies, Columbia University-5 April
1963	Marston Bates, Department of Zoology, University of Michigan-8 April
1964	Paul Sears, Department of Plant Science and Director Conservation Program, Yale University-6 April
1965	Mark H Ingraham, Department of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin-26 April
1966	Fritz Machlup, Department of Economics, Princeton University-4 April
1967	William Steere, Director, New York Botanical Garden -20  April
1969	Otto Luening, Composer and Conductor, Columbia University-13 March
1971	Henry J. Abraham, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
1972	Gordon A. Craig, Department of History, Stanford University
1974	Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Columbia University Law School-2 May
1975	Carl Woodring, George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature at Columbia University-4 May
1976	John Fischer, Harper's Magazine-5 April
1977	Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake, Department of Sociology, University of California at Los Angeles
1978	Clarence Allen, Department of Geology,  California Institute of Technology
1979	Richard Neustadt, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
1980	Hazel Barnes, Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado
1981	James D. Hart, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley
1982	Edwin S. Gaustad, Department of History, University of California, Riverside-5 April
1983	Nancie L. Gonzalez, Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland-15 March
1984	Arnold Moss, Actor and Founder of Shakespeare Festival Players
1985	Wanda Corn, Department of Art History, Stanford University-25 March
1987	Lewis Coser, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Stony Brook
1989	Robert E. Streeter, Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of English, University of Chicago
1990	Paul J. Steinhardt, Department of Physics, University of Pennsylvania
1991	David Pimental, Department of Insect Ecology & Agricultural Sciences, Cornell University
1993	Martin Marty, Cone Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Modern Christianity, University of Chicago
1994	Leon Henkin, Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley
1995	Leon Eisenberg, Presley Professor of Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
1996	Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Department of Performance Studies and Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
1997	Roger E. Howe, Department of Mathematics, Yale University
1998	Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School and Department of Political Science, University of Chicago
1999	Paul Steven Miller, Commissioner, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
2000	Holmes Rolston III, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University
2001	Richard Losick, Cabot Professor of Biology, Harvard University
2002	Arlene Saxonhouse, Department of Political Science and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan
2004	James L. Wescoat, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illiinois-UC
2005	Werner Gundersheimer, Director Emeritus, Folger Shakespeare Library
2007	Eric Heller, Department of Physics and Chemistry, Harvard University
2008	Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, Department of Systematic Theology, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
2009	Betty Smocovitis, Departments of History and Zoology, University of Florida
2011	Jack Goldstone, Hazel Professor of Public Policy, George Mason University
2013	Tyler Burge, Department of Philosophy, University of California at Los Angeles
2014	Christine M. Thomas, Department of Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara
2015	Kathleen McGarry, Department of Economics, University of California at Los Angeles
2016	Hazel V. Carby, Department of African American Studies, Yale University
2018	Stephen Walt, Department of International Relations, Harvard University
2019	Dava Newman, Department of Astronomy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2020	Richard Alley, Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University-4 Nov
2021	Richard Prum, William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Curator of Ornithology and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University