USU Honors Presents 49th Annual Honors Last Lecture With Laura Gelfand

LOGAN, Utah — The Utah State University Honors Program presents the 49th Annual Honors Last Lecture featuring Professor Laura Gelfand, the 2024 Honors Outstanding Professor.

Gelfand will deliver a lecture titled “The Future is Unwritten: Be Passionate” in the Russell/Wanlass Performance Hall on USU’s Logan campus from 3:30-4:30 p.m. Oct. 23.

The talk will challenge audience members to think about what matters most to them and consider how they can steer a course toward making a difference. Noting that many students feel pressure “to major in something that they may not really want to do,” Professor Gelfand encourages students to “do something that sustains you. I think the key to success is doing something you are passionate about.”

Laura D. Gelfand is a professor of art history and has worked at USU since 2011, when she arrived as head of the Department of Art + Design, a position she worked in until 2018.

Informed by art historical methods, Gelfand’s current research engages the vibrant, interdisciplinary world of animal studies with a particular focus on canids.

After editing the volume Our Dogs, Our Selves: Dogs in Medieval and Renaissance Art, Literature, and Culture (Brill 2016), Gelfand spent much of 2018-19 as a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of the History of Art at the University of York, where she conducted research on historical representations of wolves.

Recent publications include an essay, “The Wolf at the Door and the Dog at our Feet,” in Home Cultures: Special Issue on Animals and Home in 2021, and a chapter on “Human Animal Interactions and Art” in The Handbook on Human-Animal Interactions, Interventions and Anthrozoology (Routledge, 2023). She is currently co-editing Animals and Punk: Ethos, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Intellect), forthcoming in 2025.

Honors students nominate tenured faculty whose teaching and mentoring have made marked impacts on their lives. A committee of Honors students interviews nominees and selects one exceptional professor to imagine and deliver what might be a “last lecture” at USU, if they had only one more to give.

“This event engages the entire community — students, faculty, alumni, friends and other stakeholders — in celebrating the teachers and mentors who have transformed the experience of our students here at USU,” says Kristine Miller, professor of English and executive director of the Utah State University Honors Program.

The lecture is free and open to the public and will be followed immediately by a reception in the Russell/Wanlass Performance Hall lobby. A livestream for a statewide audience and a recording of the event after its completion can be accessed from the University Honors Program website.