Fall 2025 Events
"Transacademic Echoes: An Opening Panel With Muhlenberg Faculty"
September 3, 7 p.m.
Moyer Hall, Miller Forum
This opening event features a panel of Muhlenberg faculty offering brief reflections on this year’s Center for Ethics theme and inviting the campus community to engage in a discussion of the multiple meanings of “Transform, Translate, Transcend.”
"Transformations: A Guided Visit of Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens"
October 5, 10 a.m.
Tickets are available for 50. Reserve a slot using our Signup Genius form.
Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens is a visionary art environment created by mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar on South Street in Philadelphia. The space transforms everyday discarded objects — bottles, bicycle wheels, tiles, mirrors, folk art fragments — into immersive, kaleidoscopic murals and passageways. Zagar’s central technique of transformation lies in taking what is broken, unwanted, or ordinary and reconfiguring it into patterns that generate new meaning and beauty. The gardens themselves also transform the experience of urban space: walls, floors, and ceilings dissolve into a continuous mosaic surface, inviting visitors to see the city as a site of endless creative recomposition. In this way, Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens embodies transformation both materially — through recycling and assemblage — and conceptually, by turning fragments into a coherent, living artwork.
Emma Heaney, Ph.D.
“On the Cisness of the Bourgeoisie: A Question of Politics”
October 15, 7 p.m.
Moyer Hall, Miller Forum
A loosely organized global political movement to eliminate trans life has accelerated in the past 10 years. Liberal responses often call for depoliticizing trans issues by arguing that access to health care and public life should be governed by medical professionals and the institutions that establish medical ethics standards. This talk traces the classed and racialized history of treating trans life as an ethical question, and it suggests fortifying a politics that challenges cisnormativity as a framework for resisting the transphobic and transmisogynist forces shaping the present.
Emma Heaney is a scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies, and trans studies whose work traces the entanglement of literary form, critical theory, and embodied experience. She is the author of The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory and the editor of Feminism Against Cisness. Currently, her research develops a theory of how queer and trans identities have been articulated and transformed in literature across the 20th century.
“Translanguage, Transnation: A Poetry Reading and Conversation with Safia Elhillo”
October 23, 7 p.m.
Moyer Hall, Miller Forum
Sudanese by way of Washington, D.C., Safia Elhillo is the author of the books “The January Children,” “Girls That Never Die,” “Home Is Not A Country,” and “Bright Red Fruit.” Elhillo’s work appears in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including “The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop” and “The Penguin Book of Migration Literature.” With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology “Halal If You Hear Me,” which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Elhillo received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 30 Under 30. Her work has been translated into several languages and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. This event is co-sponsored by the Living Writers series.
Damon T. Berry, Ph.D
“Transdisciplinary Approaches to Deradicalization”
November 9, 3:30 pm
Seegers Union, Event Space
In our climate of political polarization and endless stream of reported atrocities, we often seek explanations for acts of extremist violence. We may be tempted to look to radical religion, political ideology, or even individual insanity to singularly explain why acts of horrific violence are carried out. This desire for clarity is understandable, but inadequate for the task of addressing radicalization. In this talk, Berry will advocate for a holistic approach to understanding and addressing acts of extremist violence, one that recognizes the complexity of the radicalization process and advocates for a method to deradicalization that does not rely on restricted views on how to address it.
Damon T. Berry’s research and teaching focus on the overlap of religious and racialized discourses that shape and inform ideologies and practices of exclusion and violence. His three monographs, Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism, Christianity and the Alt-Right: Exploring the Relationship, and The New Apostolic Reformation, Trump, and Evangelical Politics examine the history and evolution of extremist groups in America and their relationship to religion, racism, and the political landscape. Berry studies even the most abhorrent extremist groups through careful examination of their symbolic systems, religious frameworks, and discursive strategies rather than simply dismissing them as irrational. This expertise has led to requests to present his research to groups including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Microsoft Corporation, and the University of Virginia’s Project on Religion and Its Publics. His work has also been presented in public forums, including Public Research Associates, Sojourners, The Unpacked Project, and The University of Notre Dame’s Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights.
The Center for Ethics is co-sponsoring this Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding event.
