Speakers

Plenary Speakers

Jane Alison is the author of five novels, most recently, Villa E, about the collision of architects Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier (Norton/Liveright), along with The Love-Artist, The Marriage of the Sea, Natives and Exotics, and Nine Island. She has published a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes, about growing up in a family in which parents traded partners (Houghton); Change Me, translations of Ovid’s stories of sexual transformation (Oxford); and a book on the craft and theory of writing, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (Catapult). She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia and divides her time between Charlottesville and Campeche, with her partner, architect Edward Tuck.

 

 

 

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, an internationally bestselling author, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Dr. Eagleman’s areas of research include sensory substitution, time perception, vision, and synesthesia; he also studies the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system, and in that capacity he directs the Center for Science and Law.  Eagleman is the author of many books, including Livewired, The Runaway Species, The Brain, Incognito, and Wednesday is Indigo Blue.  He is also the author of a widely adopted textbook on cognitive neuroscience, Brain and Behavior, as well as a bestselling book of literary fiction, Sum, which has been translated into 32 languages, turned into two operas, and named a Best Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble.  Dr. Eagleman writes for the Atlantic, New York Times, Economist, Time, Discover, Slate, Wired, and New Scientist, and appears regularly on National Public Radio and BBC to discuss both science and literature.  He has been a TED speaker, a guest on the Colbert Report, and profiled in the New Yorker magazine.  He has spun several neurotech companies out of his lab. He runs the top ranking science podcast Inner Cosmos and is the writer and presenter of The Brain, an Emmy-nominated television series.

 

BYU Faculty Participants

Faith Blackhurst is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at BYU and affiliated faculty with Global Women’s Studies. Her research explores everyday narratives—on motherhood, domestic life, the female body, and food—through feminist theory, revealing how ordinary experiences shape literature, identity, and cultural memory.

 

 

 

 

 

Fidalis Buehler, is an artist influenced by his Euro-American/Pacific Island history. The impact of his bi-racial upbringing and its divergence in the home guides his creative process. He currently resides in Utah and shows his work in regional, national, and international exhibitions. He says about his art, “My work represents identity seen through the complexity of American culture and South Pacific traditions – calling attention to confrontations and conflicting realities, straddling the line between levity and earnest devotion. My work is a self-portrait seen through forms of expanded and contracted narratives. Image making is a ritual performed through playful conjuring – reassembling personal histories and inventing mythologies laden with fear, anxiety, dreams, revelations, magic, and mysticism.”

 

 

Brian Croxall is associate research professor of digital humanities at Brigham Young University. With Diane K. Jakacki, he is currently editing Teaching with Text Encoding for University of Minnesota Press, where his two previous volumes also appeared. With Michael J. Call, he co-directs the Y Play Games initiative here at BYU.

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Dewey is Department Chair of Linguistics and Director of the fNIRS Applied Linguists Lab at BYU. In his research, he explores informal and immersive language learning (study abroad, internships, service learning, expatriate work abroad, foreign‑language housing, etc.) and investigates how social, psychological, and neurological variables influence second language acquisition in such informal settings. He has conducted several neurolinguistic studies on how affect affects language processing in the brain by bilinguals, and he has studied social connectivity between storytellers and listeners that is evidenced in the brain.

 

 

 

Chanel Earl is a writer—mostly of fiction—who teaches writing at Brigham Young University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kristen Erekson is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the BYU College of Nursing. She also earned a BA degree in Art History and has a deep love of the humanities. She hosts the Every Body podcast, in which she interviews people about their health experiences and what they have learned.

 

 

 

 

 

George Handley directs the Global Environmental Studies program at BYU and is the author, most recently, of Literature and Ecotheology: From Chaos to Cosmos (Routledge). He is both an ecocritic and a creative writer.

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Hatch is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. Her book project, Ventures of the Mind, is under advance contract with The Ohio State University Press, which examines intersections of cognitive literary studies and medieval and early modern romance traditions. More generally, Laura is interested in virtue ethics, trust studies, and world literature.

 

 

 

 

 

 Nile W. Hatch is an associate professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy and is the Farr research fellow at the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University. He joined the Marriott School faculty in 2000 in strategic management and joined the entrepreneurship group in 2007 when it was created. He teaches entrepreneurship, innovation, and analytics. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and M.S. and B.S. degrees from Brigham Young University. Before coming to the Marriott School, he taught strategy at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on innovation as a learning process to reduce uncertainty, find unknown and unmet needs of customers, innovate to solve them, and compete with rivals once they enter. He addresses this process of innovating through learning through the lenses of learning curves, disruptive innovation, the social value of innovation, cognition in innovation, entry timing, competition, and trust as learning through repeated interaction. His research has appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Venturing, Harvard Business Review, Management Science, Journal of Mechanical Design, Sloan Management Review, and the Strategic Management Journal.

Rex P. Nielson is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the BYU Humanities Center. His interests include literary and cultural studies, especially in relation to the Portuguese-speaking world. He has taught a variety of courses on Luso-Afro-Brazilian literature and culture, as well as interdisciplinary courses for Latin American Studies, Africana Studies, Global Women’s Studies, and the BYU Honors Program. His research focuses on (1) environmental humanities in Brazil and the global south, (2) race and gender in Luso-Brazilian culture, (3) language and literature pedagogy, and (4) translation studies. Additionally, he has served in various professional organizations, including as President of the American Portuguese Studies Association (APSA) (2019–2020). Rex and his wife, Natalie, an adjunct professor in the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters, live in Provo and are the proud parents of five children.

 

Janis Nuckolls is an anthropological linguist with field experience primarily in Amazonian Ecuador, province of Pastaza. My research interests center upon the cultural poetics of Quichua verbal practice and the role of ideophones and grammatical categories such as evidentiality in the expression of attitudinal alignments with nonhuman nature. My latest thoughts on all of this can be found in Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue and Perspective, published by The University of Arizona Press. I teach Quichua Field Studies Classes in Ecuador during summers at the Andes and Amazon Field School in the Napo Province. My current research projects involve putting together various ‘pieces’ of Quichua grammar, including its phonology and verbal morphology, and delving more deeply into the possible role played by ideophony in the communication of unconventional knowledge.

 

 

 Shea Owens is an accomplished baritone and the Director of Opera at BYU. A versatile performer, he has appeared with opera companies and orchestras across the United States and internationally, earning recognition for his rich voice and dynamic stage presence. He has been featured as a guest soloist with the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square and recently appeared as the Pilot in The Little Prince at Utah Opera. At BYU, he oversees the training and performance of student singers and directs operatic productions that emphasize both musical excellence and the power of storytelling. Dedicated to mentoring the next generation of artists, Owens brings together his professional experience and educational vision to inspire connection, creativity, and meaning through opera.

 

 

 

Steve L. Peck is an evolutionary ecologist at Brigham Young University, specializing in Evolutionary Ecology and the Philosophy of Science, with over sixty published papers in these fields. Beyond academia, he is a prolific novelist, essayist, and poet.

His most well-known work, A Short Stay in Hell, has become something of a TikTok phenomenon, with over 35,000 ratings and over 6000 reviews on Goodreads. He is a two-time winner of the Association for Mormon Letters (AML) Novel Award for The Scholar of Moab (Torrey House Press) and Gilda Trillim (Round Fire Books), as well as a two-time recipient of the AML Short Story Award for “Two-Dog Dose” (Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought) and “Sister Carvahlo’s Excellent Relief Society Lesson” (The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction).

His novel King Leere: Goatherd of the La Sals (BCC Press), a retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear, was a semifinalist for the Black Lawrence Press Early Novel Prize, a Montaigne Medal finalist, a semifinalist for the John Hoffer Award, and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. In addition to his novels, he has published two short story collections and two books of essays exploring the intersection of science and faith.

Peck’s poetry has appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Crescendo, Dialogue, Flyway, New Myths, Pedestal Magazine, Penumbra, Prairie Schooner, Red Rock Review, Wayfare Magazine, Whitefish Review, and more. His first poetry collection, Incorrect Astronomy, was published by Aldrich Press. His latest novel, Heike’s Void, was nominated for both the Whitney and AML Novel Awards. His second poetry collection, Experiments in the Fading Light, was published by Signature Books in March of 2025.

For his contributions to literature, he received the 2021 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contributions to Mormon Letters.

Toni is a research instructor at the BYU Library and a PhD student in Instructional Psychology and Technology. Her research interests include creativity, curiosity, environmental humanities, writing studies, and women’s literature. When she was a child, her dream in life was to become an “arthur,” which is a person who writes books.

 

 

 

 

 

Stephanie Rivera

 

Dr. Jamin Creed Rowan is an Associate Professor of English and the American Studies Program Coordinator at BYU. He is the author of The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and articles in venues ranging from American Literature to the Journal of Urban History to the Journal of Transformative Education. He and an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty launched a campus-wide storytelling event series last year and are currently conducting research on the neuroscience of storytelling and social connection.

 

 

 

Jill Terry Rudy, Nan Osmond Grass Professor of English, Brigham Young University, co-authored Fairy-Tale TV with Pauline Greenhill (2020), co-edited Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television with Greenhill (2014), and edited The Marrow of Human Experience: Essays on Folklore by William A. Wilson (2006).  The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures, co-edited with Greenhill, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc, was published in 2018. The Three Nephites: Saints, Service, and Supernatural Legend, from Wilson’s story collection and co-edited with Julie Swallow, Christopher Blythe, and Eric Eliason, will be published in October 2025.

 

 

 

Richard Sandberg is the Associate Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Brigham Young University. His research focuses on the development of advanced optical and X-ray diagnostics to investigate materials under extreme conditions and at the nanoscale. Utilizing ultrafast lasers, large-scale facilities such as synchrotrons and X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), as well as compact tabletop X-ray sources, Dr. Sandberg explores the frontiers of material science. His work includes pioneering applications of X-ray lensless imaging techniques, particularly Coherent Diffraction Imaging (CDI), to study magnetic ordering and structural dynamics in materials subjected to extreme environments.

 

 

 

Keely Song Glenn (MFA) is an Associate Professor of Dance at Brigham Young University, a Certified Laban Movement Analyst (CLMA) and a Registered Somatic Movement Educator (RSME). Through her experiences of injuries, surgeries, mothering, and community, she has come to see the beauty of the dance in the simple gestures, sounds, and motions of the everyday.

 

 

 

 

 

Leslee Thorne-Murphy is a professor in the Department of English at Brigham Young University, with a specialty in Victorian literature. She also currently serves as an associate dean in the College of Humanities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stephen Tuttle is an associate professor of English. He teaches courses in creative writing and American literature, with scholarly interests in the short story, microfiction, and prose poetry. Among other assignments, he has served on the Faculty Advisory Committee and as associate chair of English.

 

 

 

 

 

Justin White received his PhD from University of California, Riverside and is an associate professor of philosophy. He was an academic visitor with the philosophy faculty at Oxford University for Trinity Term 2025. His research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy (especially phenomenology and existentialism) and contemporary philosophy of agency and moral psychology. Among other things, he is interested in love, skill, self-ignorance, and the process of personal change, including how we take (or avoid) responsibility for our actions and ourselves. His scholarship has been published in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, European Journal of Philosophy, Southern Journal of Philosophy, and Midwest Studies in Philosophy, as well as various edited volumes. He is currently working on a book project on perception, agency, and human existence in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.

 

Miranda Wilcox is an associate professor of English at BYU and holds an MMS and PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Her classes introduce students to the wonderful world of medieval literature. Her research focuses on early medieval religious culture and Latter-day Saint historical consciousness. She co-edits the Maxwell Institute’s Living Faith book series.