The Humanities Center
Dell House 302A
Johns Hopkins University
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Phone: 410-516-0474
Fax: 410-516-4897
E-mail:hentdevries@jhu.edu 
Hent de Vries is Director of the Humanities Center.
Since January 2003, Hent de Vries has held a joint appointment as Professor in the Humanities Center and the Department of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University. Since October 2007, he holds the Russ Family Chair in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, he held the Chair of Metaphysics and Its History in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam (1993-2002), where he continues to hold a research position as Professor Ordinarius of Systematic Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion. He was a co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), an interdisciplinary research institute with a graduate program, and served as the Director of its governing board (1994-98) and its Scientific Director (1998-2004). He received his PhD in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Leiden in 1989. His previous teaching and research positions include: Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of German at Johns Hopkins; Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago; Visiting Professor at the Departments of German and the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins; Senior Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago; Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions and Visiting Scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University. At Johns Hopkins, he is Director of Graduate Studies in the Humanities Center and a member of the steering committee of The Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Jewish Studies Program in the School of Arts and Sciences. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Zanvyl Krieger School's Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality (WGS). Since May 2007, Hent de Vries is Directeur de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, in Paris. His teaching focuses on modern European thought, but reflects other interests as well. He offers undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on the history and critique of metaphysics, philosophies of religion, political theologies, concepts of violence, the tradition of spiritual exercises and of moral perfectionism, literature and temporality. He is Chair of The Future of the Religious Past, an interdisciplinary program sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), which will disburse €5.4 million in support of advanced research and international conferences at Dutch universities in 2002-2010. In this capacity, he is also serves as General Editor of six volumes of proceedings resulting from the program. Since January 2006, he has served as an advisor to the Netherlands Scientific Council of Government Policy (WRR) in The Hague, and as a member of its project group on Religion and the Public Domain, whose report is expected to be the basis for the WRR's policy recommendations to the Dutch government in 2007. In 2006, Hent de Vries was a member of the working group "Values, Beliefs and Ideologies as Forces behind the Changing Europe," sponsored by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), a partnership between fifteen Humanities Research Councils across Europe and the European Science Foundation. HERA partners aim to establish best practices in funding mechanisms, research priorities, humanities infrastructure and the development of a transnational funding program. Since November 2007, he is a member of the Management Committee of the European Science Foundation's Forward Look Program on “Religion and Belief Systems.” His principal publications include: Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Johns Hopkins UP, 1999, 2000), Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Johns Hopkins UP, 2002, 2006), and Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005). He is the co-editor, with Samuel Weber, of Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford UP, 1997) and of Religion and Media (Stanford UP, 2002). He co-edits, with Mieke Bal, the book series Cultural Memory in the Present, published by Stanford University Press. He is also the co-editor, with Lawrence E. Sullivan, of Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (Fordham UP 2006), the editor of Religion: Beyond a Concept (Fordham UP 2007), and the co-editor, with Ward Blanton, of Paul in Philosophy and Culture. Currently, he is completing three book-length studies, entitled Of Miracles and Special Effects, Stanley Cavell and Other Moral Perfectionists, and Instances: Spiritual Exercises in the Literatures of Time.
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