The event will honor the work of scholars from across the arts and sciences disciplines.

In conjunction with the event, the Campus Store in Mallinckrodt Student Center will be selling books by colloquium participants, who will be available after the colloquium to sign their works.

William H. Danforth, chancellor emeritus and vice chairman of the Board of Trustees, will present opening remarks. In addition, Pascal Boyer, Ph.D., the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory in Arts & Sciences, and Rebecca Messbarger, Ph.D., associate professor of Romance languages in Arts & Sciences, will read from their publications and take questions.

Boyer is the author of Tradition as Truth and Communication (1990), The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (1994) and Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (2001). His scholarship combines anthropological fieldwork and psychological experiments and aims to describe the psychological foundations of culture.

Messbarger is the author of The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse (2002), which the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago recently nominated for the International Flaiano Prize, awarded by the Ministry of Italian Culture. Messbarger is writing a book on the life and work of 18th-century Bolognese artist and anatomist Anna Morandi Manzolini.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 935-5576.