Project funded by the Teagle Foundation
Sydney Watts, associate professor of history, is director of The Pedagogy of Belief and Doubt, a new project funded with a $100,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation.
Many large questions discussed in the classroom inevitably raise issues of religious belief, and faculty confronting these questions often put their personal convictions aside in the hopes of engaging in unbiased, meaningful discussion. But in a society of dramatic diversity and often politicized religion, this may not be adequate or possible.
Faculty from a variety of disciplines from UR and other institutions who are interested in revising or creating new courses that raise spiritual questions will be selected to explore this issue together in a week-long seminar with follow up activities.
Dr. Watts’ current research centers on the history of Lent and the rise of secular society in urban France, dealing with the problem of belief and doubt from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. She received her Ph.D. in French History from Cornell University, and has been at Richmond since 1999.