We are happy to announce Professor John Lardas Modern as the Alice Eckardt Scholar-in-Residence for 2026.
Professor John Lardas Modern is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of the Humanities and Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He serves as co-director of the Institute of the Mechanical Surround and co-editor of Class 200: New Studies in Religion at the University of Chicago Press. He is the author of Neuromatic; or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain, which was named best book in 2022 by the International Society of Science and Religion as well as The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (2001) and Secularism in Antebellum America. Prof. Modern is currently working on a book about intelligence, memory, and mourning and a long-term project that explores the end of the world through the lens of Akron, OH.
Prof. Modern will be at Lehigh University from October 6th to 8th. He will deliver the Eckardt Lecture on "Programming People to Simulate Machines: Religion of AI Observed" on Wednesday, October 7 at 4:30pm in Whitaker 303.