James Turner is the Reverend John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C. Professor of Humanities at the University of Notre Dame. He was educated in history at Harvard University (Ph.D.) and specializes in American and British intellectual history with particular respect to the history of academic knowledge and higher education. In 1997 Dr. Turner founded the Erasmus Institute, to foster research bringing Catholic and other Abrahamic intellectual traditions to bear on significant issues in contemporary scholarship; and he directed the Institute until 2003. Dr. Turner's own publications include: "Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind" (1980); "Without God Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America" (1985); "The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton" (1999); "The Sacred and the Secular University" (with Jon H. Roberts, 2000); and "Language, Religion, Knowledge" (2003).

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