CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Sabina Alkire, a Champaign native and director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at the University of Oxford, will deliver the annual Marjorie Hall Thulin Lecture on Religion and Contemporary Culture at the University of Illinois.
Alkire’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “How an Adequate Notion of Human Flourishing Challenges Economics.” Alkire will speak at 8 p.m. on April 7 in the Knight Auditorium of the Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana.
While on campus, Alkire will be a guest on “Focus 580 With David Inge” broadcast on WILL-AM (580) at 10:06 a.m. on April 6.
During her talk, Alkire will discuss the rapid pace of change occurring in economics and “the fact that economic growth has not always ushered in advances in other dimensions of life that matter to people.” Alkire will draw on new natural law theory as advanced by Australian philosopher John Finnis and the capability approach of Harvard University economist Amartya Sen, 1998 winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his work on poverty and welfare economics.
Alkire’s research interests include multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis.
She is the author of “Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction” (Oxford University Press, 2002) as well as many publications about the dimensions of human development and multidimensional measures of poverty and well-being.
Alkire graduated from the U. of I. in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and was a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford, where she earned master’s degrees in theology and economics as well as a doctorate in economics.
The Thulin lecture, which is sponsored by the department of religion, is named in honor of Marjorie Hall Thulin (1910-2009). A 1931 graduate of the U. of I., Thulin had a successful career in advertising and published poetry and children’s literature and edited a book on the history of Glencoe, Ill., where she was a longtime resident. Thulin established an endowed fund, the Marjorie Hall Thulin Scholar of Religion and Contemporary Culture, which brings internationally known scholars of religion and contemporary culture to campus each year as resident scholars and to deliver the annual lecture.
For more information, contact Robert McKim, the head of the department of religion, at 244-5832 or rmckim@illinois.edu.
