Research Interests for Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Smith's research is largely theoretical and interdisciplinary. She was initially trained in biology, experimental psychology and philosophy at City College in New York and later studied English and American literature at Brandeis University, specializing in language theory, poetics and the literature of the English Renaissance. Before coming to Duke in 1987, she was University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with co-appointments in the Annenberg School of Communications, the English Department and the graduate program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. Smith's past research has been concerned with literary theory, poetry and poetics, ideas of value and judgment, and intellectual controversies over science and knowledge. Her current work focuses on developments in cognitive science and the philosophy of biology, intellectual issues involving science and religion, and the historical, intellectual and institutional relations between the humanities and the sciences.

Keywords:

Critical theory, 20th-century intellectual history, Science studies, Philosophy of science, Science and religion

Current projects:

Completing a book, Natural Reflections: At the Nexus of Science and Religion, revised and expanded from my Terry Lectures,given at Yale Univ October, 2006.

Representative Publications

1. Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion, The Terry Lectures Series (Winter, 2009), Yale University Press [book.asp]
2. Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (2005/2006), Edinburgh UP/Duke UP [books.php3]
3. Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (1997), Harvard UP
4. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (1988), Harvard UP
5. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (1968), U of Chicago P
6. Reply to an Analytic Philosopher, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 101 no. 1 (Winter, 2002)
7. "Naturalism, Otherwise", The Immanent Frame (June 23, 2008) [>]
8. "Cognitive Machinery and Explanatory Ambitions", Online Forum, The Immanent Frame (June 16, 2008) [available here]