Clifford Backman

Backman is a professor of History at Boston University who has written multiple books, and he is currently finishing a biography of the medieval Spanish king James II of the Crown of Aragon. He will be our Thursday evening keynote speaker.

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Jim Hutchisson

Hutchinson is a professor of American and Southern Literatures and Director of Graduate Studies in English at The Citadel. He is a prolific writer and editor and most recently published Ernest Hemingway: A New Life, He will be our Friday lunch speaker.

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Heather Collins

Collins is Department Head for Behavioral and Social Sciences at Trident Technical College. She is passionate about the science of everyday life, as can be seen in her TEDx talk Successful Thinking: It’s a Know-Brainer. She will be our Saturday lunch speaker.

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Extended Speaker Bios

Clifford R. Backman – Thursday Evening

Clifford Backman attended the University of Minnesota and the University of California at Los Angeles. He received a PhD in May of 1989 and began teaching at Boston University in September of that year. He teaches both halves of our Western Civilization sequence, a survey of medieval Europe, lecture courses on medieval intellectual life and the history of the Crusades, and a class on the history of piracy, among other things. He teaches a variety of courses in the CAS Writing Program and the Core Curriculum as well.

Professor Backman has written multiple books: two books on medieval Sicily (one published in 1995, another in-press in Italy), a general history of the Middle Ages, a book on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations from the Middle Ages to the present. He is currently finishing a biography of a medieval Spanish king (James II of the Crown of Aragon), and working on a study of the moral idea of tolerance in Western thought and on the history of forgiveness.

James M. Hutchisson – Friday Lunch

James M. Hutchisson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1961 and was educated in Virginia public schools until going on to take his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 1987. He served on the faculty of Washington and Jefferson College until 1989, when he came to The Citadel. There, he is currently Professor of American and Southern Literatures, Director of Graduate Study in English, and four-time winner of The Citadel’s Faculty Achievement Award in Scholarship. As an expert on both Edgar Allan Poe and the Charleston Renaissance, he is author or editor of 10 books, and more than 60 scholarly articles or nonfiction essays on a wide range of American authors and on southern studies. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Oxford American.  He has been interviewed by the BBC, NPR, and Radio Free Europe. His most recent book is Ernest Hemingway: A New Life, published by Penn State University Press in 2016.

Heather R. Collins – Saturday Lunch

Heather R. Collins is a Cognitive Psychologist and Cognitive Neuroscientist, passionate about communicating the impact of science on everyday life to the public.  Her TEDx Talk, Successful Thinking: It’s a Know-Brainer has 10,000+ views.  Her fascination with how humans interact with their environment and how individual differences in memory can occur led Dr. Collins to pursue a B.S. in Psychology at the University of Washington followed by a Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  A native Oregonian, she migrated east to pursue opportunities at the University of Kentucky and the Medical University of South Carolina. Dr. Collins presently serves as Department Head for Behavioral and Social Sciences at Trident Technical College., Dr. Collins is enjoying living in the coastal community of Charleston and is still acclimating to the humidity.