Meet Thursday’s Plenary Speaker at ATLA 2018, Timothy Beal

We are pleased to introduce Thursday’s plenary speaker, Timothy Beal, for the 2018 ATLA Annual Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana, June 13-16.

Timothy Beal is the Florence Harkness Professor of Religion and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He has published thirteen books, most recently The Book of Revelation: A Biography (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2018), for which he won a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts, which was named the Best Print Reference in the Humanities by Library Journal in 2015. He has written essays on religion, media, and culture for The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, and CNN.com, among others.

Over the past few years, he has begun working in the programming language of Python in order to carry out research in natural language processing, machine learning, and neural machine translation as they relate to religious studies and the humanities more broadly.

Save the date for Thursday, June 14, for his talk, “Face of the Deep: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Humanities — Or, Why Librarians Need to Learn to Code.”

Registration for the 2018 ATLA Annual Conference will open this spring. Go to the Annual Conference website for registration updates.