Current Visiting Scholars

Matt Bedke is a philosopher who studies the nature of normativity. He is interested in claims about what we ought to do, what we have reason to do, what beliefs are justified, what political systems are just and fair, what things are good for their own sake, what counts as a virtue, and similar claims concerning advice and evaluation. While at the Center he will be focusing on the meanings of these sort of claims, the mental states and attitudes involved in having corresponding normative thoughts, and the facts (if any) that these claims and thoughts are about. His work draws on ethical theory, cognitive science, semantics, logic, and more. While a visiting scholar at CASBS, he plans to write a book manuscript arguing that some version of subjectivism is the best explanation of all the interesting features of normativity. Though on this view normativity bears deep similarities to matters of taste, the subjectivity he will defend avoids the corrosively skeptical thought that nothing *really* matters.

Bedke is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He has published in metaethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of law. More information about him and his work can be found on his PhilPeople website: https://philpeople.org/profiles/matthew-bedke.

As a convener of national conversations on religion and science and a chaplain to graduate students and faculty at Cornell, Eagleson supports faculty conversations on the ethics and societal impact of emerging technologies. As a visiting scholar at CASBS, she will create a report for religious organizations outlining best practices and key scholarship for curating academic and public conversations on artificial intelligence, religion, and the social sciences.

Eagleson serves as Director of Innovation and Partnerships for American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), an international network of Christians in science dedicated to promoting dialogue on science and faith. She launched and currently leads the student/early career track at the ASA Annual Meeting. She is also director of graduate and faculty engagement for Chesterton House, a center for Christian studies at Cornell. Through Chesterton House, she also directs The Ithaca Roundtable on Science and Religion, a project which brings faculty of all belief systems together around a fine meal to discuss scholarship on religion and science. Eagleson holds a PhD in early modern literature from the University of Delaware and an MA in liberal arts from St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD). Her dissertation focused on poets John Donne and George Herbert, both authors who deepened her interest in the history of science. Eagleson is the editor of Science and Faith: Student Questions Explored (Hendrickson, 2019).

You can read more about her work at https://hannaheagleson.com/

Kuukuwa Manful is a researcher and trained architect who creates, studies, and documents architecture in Africa.

While at CASBS as a visiting scholar, she will be writing up research on what she terms the unformalisation of indigenous architectures and construction technologies in West Africa. This work is based on a collection of over 30,000 endangered archival documents from early- and mid-twentieth century Ghana that she digitised with a grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. She will analyse the colonial and postcolonial development of urban governance, building regulation, and the architecture profession to show how authorities used formalisation and regulation processes to diminish and exclude indigenous builders and built forms. She will also explore the contemporary legacies of these in African cities.

From September 2022, she will be a postdoctoral researcher on the African State Architecture project. She holds Masters and BSc Architecture degrees from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and an MSc African Studies from The University of Oxford. Her PhD from SOAS, University of London is an examination of nation-building, social class, and modernities through an analysis of the sociopolitical and physical architectures of secondary schools in Ghana. You can learn more about her at www.kuukuwa.com and follow her on Twitter: @Kuukuwa_