Dawn Cheryl Hill (Mohawk, Turtle Clan)
Mohawk, Turtle Clan
Every Child Matters Day
Tuesday, September 30, 2025 | 5:00 p.m.
Title: Memory Keeper—Residential Schools, Indigenous Healing, and the Path to Reconciliation
Sponsored by the Every Child Matters Day Committee, the Office of Academic Affairs, and the Castellani Art Museum
Dawn Cheryl Hill, BA, MSW, RSW is the daughter of two residential school survivors. She is the mother of Jordan, Justin, Dylan and Jessica. She is the grandmother of Lucien, Kane and Elessa. She is a beading artisan, published writer, and an enrolled member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, a Mohawk/Tuscarora of the Turtle Clan.
Her first book, Memory Keeper has been nominated for an Indigenous Voices Award; it has also received the 2022 First Nation Communities Read Long-list Award. Memory Keeper has also been selected as a recommended read by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She won the Ontario Native Women’s Association’s (ONWA) Every Story Matters Writing Competition, May 2024. Dawn is an Ambassador for the Chaney-Wenjack foundation, and a member of the North American Indigenous Women’s Association (NAIWA). She is also a Board Member of the Six Nations Library.
Dawn grew up at the Tuscarora Territory in Lewiston, N.Y. She currently resides at the Six Nations territory in Ohsweken, Ontario since 2016. Dawn holds a Bachelor of Arts in Community Mental Health and a Master of Social Work (BA/MSW) degree from the University at and Buffalo. She is a Registered Social Worker (RSW) with the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers (OCSWSSW) and the Ontario Association of Social Workers (OASW). She retired in May 2024 and opened her own private practice, Sacred Circle Therapy.
Her scholarly interests include intergenerational and multigenerational trauma, transmission of unresolved historical trauma, land-based healing, traditional healing, traditional medicines, addictions, domestic violence, sexual abuse, suicide contagion, epistemicide, epigenetics, and antiracist therapy.
Dawn utilizes many treatment modalities including ACT, CBT, DBT, EMDR, behavioral activation, and narrative therapy. She also incorporates traditional land-based healing methodologies into her practice, as needed.
Throughout her social work career Dawn has worked as a psychiatric social worker, psychotherapist, adult clinician, addictions counselor, director of behavioral health, medical social worker, drug court analyst, director of an independent living center, intensive family case manager, and a prevention case manager.
Russell P. Johnson, Ph.D.
McNulty Endowed Lecture
Thursday, October 2, 2025 | 5:00 p.m.
Title: Peace, Protest, and Polarization: Loving Your Enemies in Divided Times
Sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies
Russell P. Johnson studies religious ethics and the philosophy of communication. His research focuses on disagreement, antagonism, and how groups imagine and treat their enemies. His work draws from rhetorical theory, Christian theology, peace and conflict studies, and dialogical philosophy to explore how the “good guys versus bad guys” mindset distorts people’s perceptions of themselves and their opponents. His teaching includes courses on nonviolent direct action, argumentation and epistemology, and religion and film. His first book, Beyond Civility in Social Conflict: Dialogue, Critique, and Religious Ethics, is about the ethics of communication and how to challenge people’s views in a compassionate and disruptive way. Dr. Johnson is a monthly columnist for Sightings.
Curt Jaimungal
Peggy and John Day University Honors Endowed Lecture
Thursday, October 9, 2025 | 6:00 p.m.
Title: What Is Reality? A Survey of Theories (and Why They’re All Wrong)
Curt Jaimungal—Toronto-born mathematical-physics graduate of the University of Toronto—interrogates competing unification frameworks through his long-form interview series Theories of Everything, which now spans over 300 episodes with guests such as Roger Penrose, Donald Hoffman, Leonard Susskind, and Geoffrey Hinton; his analytic lens shaped the feature comedy I’m Okay (2016) and documentary Better Left Unsaid (2021), distributed internationally; beyond broadcasting he contributes essays and moderates philosophy-of-science events for places like the Institute of Art and Ideas and distills ongoing debates in physics, consciousness, and AI for a 8,000-subscriber Substack readership; his current research applies category-theoretic mapping to chart the epistemic limits that Gödel incompleteness, quantum indeterminacy, and simulation-level ambiguity impose on every putative “Theory of Everything.”
Alan T. Remaley, M.D., Ph.D.
Hughes Endowed Lecture in the Health Sciences
Thursday, October 16, 2025 | 5:00 p.m.
Title: Finding Your Path: A Physician-Scientist’s Journey of Discovery and Meaning
Alan T. Remaley, M.D., Ph.D., is the section chief of the Lipoprotein Metabolism Laboratory in the Translational Vascular Medicine Branch of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in Bethesda, MD. He is also a senior staff member of the Department of Laboratory Medicine at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. Dr. Remaley received his B.S. in Biochemistry and Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. He received in 1987 a M.D. and Ph.D. (Biochemistry) degree from the University of Pittsburgh and completed in 1990 a residency in Clinical Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania. He did a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Bryan Brewer at NHLBI from 1990-1995. He has been the recipient of many awards for his research and has published over 500 papers in the field of lipoprotein metabolism and cardiovascular disease. He is an inventor on multiple patents related to new therapeutic agents and diagnostic tests for cardiovascular disease. He has made important contributions to the field of High-density lipoprotein metabolism, particularly related to the mechanism of cholesterol efflux by the ABCA1 transporter and has developed apoA-I mimetic peptides and recombinant Lecithin:Cholesterolacyl transferase into therapies, which have been tested in early-stage clinical trials. More recently he has expanded his research into Low-density lipoproteins (LDL), the main driver of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. He has developed an equation, which is widely used for estimating the cholesterol content of LDL, and described the first high-resolution structure of APOB100, the main protein constituent of LDL and the ligand for the removal of LDL from the circulation by its receptor.
Marilie Coetsee, Ph.D.
Albert the Great Endowed Lecture
Thursday, October 30, 2025 | 5:00pm
Title: Religion and Political Polarization: Using Faith to Build Bridges or Deepen Partisan Divides
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy
Marilie Coetsee is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hope College. She earned her PhD in Philosophy and MA in Religious Studies from Rutgers University. She grew up in a small Christian Reformed Church in the diverse San Francisco Bay Area. Her experiences there led her to research questions pertaining to how religious believers and secular citizens should engage together in a democratic society. In her broader work, she also investigates questions in moral psychology, epistemology, and Islamic ethics and politics. She is the co-author of Does Faith Belong in Politics? Debating the Place of Religion in a Pluralistic Polity (forthcoming with Routledge), and has published in a variety of journals including Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.
