Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University and founder of its Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory. The author of numerous studies of language, literature, and critical theory, including Poetic Closure (1968), On the Margins of Discourse (1978), and Contingencies of Value (1988), Smith has been concerned for some time with intellectual issues involving truth and knowledge, the psychology of belief, and the historical, intellectual, and institutional relations between the sciences and the humanities. Her recent publications include Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (1997); Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (2005); Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion (2010); and Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene: On Science, Belief, and theHumanities (2018)