Thomas E. Burman, Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies and Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.
He is the author of Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050-1200 (1994); Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and, with Brian A. Catlos and Mark D. Meyerson, of The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022). With Sergio LaPorta, Alison Vacca et al., he is editor and translator of A Connecting Polemic in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Correspondence of Leo III and ʿUmar II (Chicago: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, 2025). He is currently writing a book entitled Beyond the Mediterranean: The Intellectual Venture of Ramon Martí OP, 1250-84. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2025-26, he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
"Greek Qurʾāns and Latin Talmuds: Translating Holy Books in the Medieval World"
April 1 - 2, 2027 - Keynote at the University of Wyoming. Date and time to be announced.
past visiting scholars
Spring 2024
Dr. Talitha Washington, Director of the Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative
The Alpha Chapter of Wyoming brought Dr. Talitha Washington to campus April 23-24, 2024. Dr. Washington is the inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Data Science Initiative, a Professor of Mathematics at Clark Atlanta University and an affiliate faculty at Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Spelman College. Dr. Washington is the Director and lead principal investigator of the NSF-funded National Data Science Alliance (NDSA) and the President of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). She works across Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to increase the number of Blacks with expertise in data science and expand data science research that advocates for social justice.
Spring 2022
Howard Bloch, Sterling Professor of French, Yale University
Gothic Cathedrals and State Building in the High Middle Ages
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)
Highlights in the history of the PBK Visiting scholar program at uw
Highlights visiting scholars to UW from 1957 - 2021
The University of Wyoming has earned its Research Level 1 (R1) status from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, placing Wyoming's only four-year university with the top research universities in the United States.