Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University, where she directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory. She also holds the position of Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University. She is the author of, among other works, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Harvard University Press, 1988), Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Harvard University Press, 1997), and Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (Edinburgh University Press, 2005/Duke University press, 2006). A forthcoming book, Natural Reflections: At the Nexus of Science and Religion, is based on her Dwight M. Terry Lectures, delivered at Yale University in 2006. Read Nathan Schneider's interview with Barbara Herrnstein Smith here.