2025 Cardin Lecture to Feature Award-Winning Author Dara Horn
Award-winning author and journalist Dara Horn will deliver the 2025 Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 21, at 7 p.m., at Loyola University Maryland (McGuire Hall - Andrew White Student Center, 4501 North Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21210).
Titled, “In the Haunted Present: Dara Horn’s Dream for Living Jews,” the lecture is free and open to the region’s academic and religious communities, as well as the public.
Horn – who has addressed audiences in hundreds of venues throughout North America, Israel, and Australia – will discuss Jewish life in America post Oct. 7, 2023, particularly the rise of antisemitism. The talk will tie in with her book: People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (2021).
“Dara Horn’s non-fiction work deals with the rise of antisemitism in the United States and the interest in understanding the Jewish past (and its horrors) rather than broad support for the future of the Jewish people,” said Amy Becker, Ph.D., professor of communication and media at Loyola University Maryland.
“She’s written extensively about how smart people fall for antisemitic tropes, the rise of antisemitism on college campuses especially after Oct. 7, and the very real threat of antisemitism that American Jewish families deal with on a regular basis,” Becker adds.
Horn recently launched the non-profit Mosaic Persuasion, which is devoted to educating the broader American public about Jewish civilization in K-12 schools and other channels.
Translated into 11 languages and selected by New York Times Notable Books, Booklist’s Best 25 Books of the Decade, and San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of the Year, Horn’s books include the novels In the Image (Norton 2002), The World to Come (Norton 2006), All Other Nights (Norton 2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (Norton 2013), and Eternal Life (Norton 2018), the essay collection People Love Dead Jews (Norton 2021), and One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe (Norton 2025).
Named one of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists, Horn received two National Jewish Book Awards, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. She also was a finalist for the JW Wingate Prize, the Simpson Family Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Her nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and The Jewish Review of Books, among many other publications, and she is a regular columnist for Tablet.
Horn received her doctorate in Yiddish and Hebrew literature from Harvard University. She has taught courses in these subjects at Sarah Lawrence College and Yeshiva University and has held the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies at Harvard.
“We are excited to host the distinguished novelist and public intellectual Dara Horn and look forward to continuing the Cardin Lecture’s tradition of bringing together the Jewish and Christian communities of Baltimore for intellectual enrichment and mutual understanding,” said Mavis Biss, Ph.D., director of Loyola University Maryland's Center for the Humanities, which annually hosts and sponsors the Cardin Lecture.
Registration for the Cardin Lecture is required by visiting www.loyola.edu/events/cardin-lecture.
For more information, call 410-617-2973 or email advevents@loyola.edu.
About the Cardin Lecture
The Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture was established in 1986 by the Jerome S. Cardin family to foster exploration of topics in the humanities pertinent to the Jewish and Christian traditions, particularly in Jewish-Christian relations. Notable speakers have included Chaim Potok, Cornel West, Taylor Branch, Adam Gopnik, Stephen Greenblatt, Susannah Heschel, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Robert Alter.
About the Center
The Center for the Humanities was established in 1983 through the generosity of many donors and of the National Endowment for the Humanities to provide strength and vision to the humanities at Loyola University Maryland. It offers lectures, lectures series and fine arts performances; other forms of research support for both faculty and students, and various forms of support for teaching in the humanities.