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Carolina's Kaufman at commencement


Peter Kaufman, an award-winning teacher and professor of religious studies, will discuss memory Dec. 20 as the featured speaker at the mid-winter commencement ceremony.

The ceremony, to be held at 2 p.m. in the Dean E. Smith Center, recognizes students who completed degrees in summer or December. Parking will be available adjacent the Smith Center and in nearby lots. Parking monitors will assist visitors attending the ceremony. A reception on the Smith Center concourse will follow the ceremony.

Kaufman will continue a Carolina tradition of faculty speakers at December commencement. He was nominated to speak by the senior class marshals, and a selection committee endorsed that choice, said Richard Edwards, interim provost.

Kaufman came to Carolina in 1978. He has been honored several times with a variety of campuswide teaching awards. Those honors include twice being cited with the Tanner Faculty Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and one of last year's Undergraduate Teaching Awards, based upon students' nominations and evaluations.

Since 1991, Kaufman has been faculty coordinator of the University's Johnston Scholars Program, a role that involves supervising academic advising, mentoring as well as curriculum and extracurricular activities for more than 240 top undergraduates. Kaufman also serves as faculty coordinator for the Carolina Scholars Program. He also has chaired and served on several campus-wide committees dealing with topics such as the status of minorities and the disadvantaged.

Off campus, Kaufman is coordinator of the Collegium on Religion in American Intellectual Life, based at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park and sponsored by the Lilly Foundation.

Kaufman has written numerous scholarly articles and books, the latter of which include Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection, published in 1996 by the University of Illinois Press, and Church, Book, and Bishop: Conflict and Authority in Early Latin Christianity, which came out in 1996 from Harper Collins Westview. His other books include Redeeming Politics (1990) and The Polytyque Churche: Religion and Early Tudor Political Culture, 1485-1516 (1986).

A native of Bridgeport, Conn., Kaufman earned a doctorate and master's degrees from University of Chicago as well as master's and bachelor's degrees from the Chicago Theological Seminary and Trinity College, respectively.


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