The Daedalus Lecture Series carves out a space for academic discussion, offering both a platform for sharing innovative work and the opportunity to come together as a diverse scholarly community. Rather than a teaching lecture, the presentations are conceived as a way to converse with and learn from one another in ways that enrich our community and broaden our interdisciplinary knowledge. Daedalus Lectures are intended to facilitate the sharing of research among colleagues.

The Swope Endowed Lecture supports speakers, artists, and lecturers to visit Puget Sound to deepen our engagement with issues related to faith, ethics, values, and religion in society.  For Fall 2025, we are excited to welcome Dr. Vanessa Gomez Brake, the Senior Associate Dean for Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California. Dr. Gomez Brake's keynote address is titled "At the Intersections of Faith, Identity, and Power: Disrupting Christian Hegemony in Higher Education."   The lecture is free and open to the public, but tickets are required.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) romantic companions are increasingly used today, with a recent poll estimating that almost one third of Americans have had a romantic relationship with an AI model. “I’d divorce and leave my husband for ChatGPT, if he could be put in a physical body,” exclaimed a recent Reddit post that gathered attention. And yet, despite this, and despite their apparently impressive intelligence in various domains, none of the leading AI models of today are conscious, according to our best theories of consciousness.

An invitation to think on the edges, surfaces, and turns of the literary artifact when it crosses cultural boundaries.

Guest lecture with Amit Ron, Associate Professor in the School of Social & Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University: "The Bottom Line and the Picket Line," on April 15 at 4:00pm in Wyatt 109.

Redford Post-Doctoral Fellow Anna Soifer will present her talk "Cross-Craft Interaction at Poggio Civitate: The Social Dynamics" in Wyatt 109 on April 8th a

Hrishikesh Hirway to Lead Pierce Lecture Q&A on AI’s Creative Future.

Gut Microbes and Their Physical Concerns. Presented by Raghuveer Parthasarathy, from the department of Physics at the University of Oregon.

Seeing without Eyes: Functional Analysis of the Plant Light Receptor Phytochrome. Presentation by Andreas Madlung for Thompson Hall Science and Math Seminar Series.

Puget Sound alumnus Rev. Jae Bates '18 will lead this exploration of his journey to Christian Public Leadership, digging into the TRUE meaning of "evangelical" (little e) being "in accordance with or related to the Good News (the Gospel).  Jae will discuss the (Mainline and Otherwise) Church's complicity in slowly building Christian White Nationalism and how these three "R-Words" (Revelation, Revolution, & Revival) are going to be crucial to pushing back against the hijacking of the Gospels of Jesus and the democracy of America.