The David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University will host a pair of lectures March 7-8 in 238 Herald R. Clark Building.
Deborah S. Davis, a professor of sociology at Yale University, will present an Area Focus Lecture on “Inequality and Wealth in China” Tuesday, March 7, at 3 p.m.
Elizabeth A. Sewell, associate director of the BYU International Center for Law and Religion Studies, will present “Contemporary Issues Affecting International Religious Freedom” for a Global Focus Lecture Wednesday, March 8, at noon.
Admission to both lectures is free and the public is welcome to attend.
In addition to teaching at Yale, Davis directs a summer fieldwork seminar, where Yale students work collaboratively with students from China. In past summers, the seminar has investigated such topics as transformations of childhood consumption, changing concepts of privacy and property rights, the uses of public space in new and old residential communities in Hong Kong and Shanghai and economic and social change in rural Yunnan.
She has authored several publications and serves on the editorial boards of “European Journal of East Asian Studies,” “Social Forces” and “Yale China Health Journal.”
Davis received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Wellesley College, a master’s degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University and a doctoral degree in sociology from Boston University.
Prior to joining the faculty at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU, Sewell served as an associate with the Appellate and Supreme Court Practice Group Mayer, Brown and Platt in Washington, D.C., where she researched and drafted briefs in federal and state courts of appeal and in the U.S. Supreme Court.
From 1997 to 1998, she served as a judicial clerk for Judge J. Clifford Wallace in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and she worked as a legal intern for the Department of Churches at the Ministry of Culture in the Czech Republic.
Sewell, who speaks fluent Russian and Czech, received both a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and Russian and a Juris Doctor from Brigham Young University.
Both lectures will be archived online. For more information on Kennedy Center events, visit kennedy.byu.edu.
Writer: Brian Rust
