Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies, S. Brent Plate, recently published articles in the scholarly journals Religious Studies and Theology: Interdisciplinary Studies in Religion and New Theology Review. Both deal with relations between religion and media.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate was invited to serve as one of four senior editors to Oxford University Press’s reference work, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts. Plate’s fellow co-editors come from the United States and Europe.

WAMC/Northeast Public Radio in Albany will feature a reading by Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate on Friday, July 29, as part of the public radio station’s Academic Minute. Plate’s topic explores the point at which art becomes blasphemy. Plate was last heard on the program in December 2010 when he discussed the persistence of myth.

Aside from the summer blockbusters like Bridesmaids, Hangover Pt 2, and Transformers, a few smaller scale films have been making the rounds, stirring up chatter in cinema lobbies and on the Internet. Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate has commented and been quoted on a couple of these films on CNN.com and other online outlets.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate co-edited a special issue of the journal Material Religion titled "Key Words in Material Religion." The edition is a collection of essays by prominent practitioners on 19 key words used to address material religion. Plate also serves as the publication's managing editor.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies Brent Plate wrote a review of Peter Greenaway’s “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway” for the March 22 issue of Arts and Christianity magazine. The massive multimedia installation, recently on display at the Central Park Armory, is part of Greenaway’s “Ten Classic Paintings Revisited,” an ongoing series in which he merges iconic works of art into a cinematic experience.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies Brent Plate’s perspectives on this year’s Oscar nominees and the themes conveyed by them appear on several major media sites including CNN.com, Religion Dispatches and beliefnet.com. “It’s kind of an unusual year – almost all of the top films have relatively little explicit religious dimensions to them,” said Plate. “But these films are asking the same questions that religions ask: Where did we come from, how did we get here, where are we going and who are we?”

Hamilton College attracted the media’s attention quite often this year in feature stories and news reports. Among the areas most often addressed by the media in covering Hamilton were topics related to the admission process.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate presented the lecture "Interreligious Dialogue Through Visual Imagery: Jews, Muslims and Christians in Iberia" at the Cleveland Museum of Art, in conjunction with the Baker-Nord Humanities Center at Case Western Reserve University on Nov. 17.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate published an article titled “Getting Religion at the Cineplex” on the Annenberg School for Communication’s “Trans/Mission” website. He wrote about several recent films that “explore and provoke questions about what it means to be human.”