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Here are faculty news items and notes from abroad and from closer to home:

• Steven Kepnes, ������’s Finard Professor in Jewish Studies and Religion, is teaching a six-week course comparing sacred texts in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam at the Pontificia Universita Gregoriana in Italy.

As the university’s first Hassett Kehoe Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies, he also delivered the program’s inaugural lecture, on “The Imperative of Jewish Christian Muslim Dialogue.” More than 200 people attended, including Canadian, French, Irish, American, and Australian ambassadors to the Holy See.

• Matt Leone, organizer of the ������ Writer’s Conference and director of Summer Programs, had his — Shapes of Openness: Bakhtin, Lawrence, Laughter — published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

• Through the Fulbright Scholar Program, Dan Epstein, assistant professor of political science, is spending the spring semester teaching courses about political parties at Bryansk State University in Bryansk, Russia. In the city of Samara, he delivered a lecture on the moral claims of military and democratic regimes in Latin America.

“It was quite well-received,” said Epstein, “in part because I was the only foreign participant who delivered my lecture in Russian, and also because Latin America is so little-studied in central Russia that it was the first time some of the participants had heard such a presentation.”

• Works by three members of the art and art history department — Linn Underhill, John Knecht and Lynn Schwarzer — are featured in Stone Canoe, an arts published by Syracuse University.

Another Colgate faculty member, Lynette Stephenson, curated the visual arts section of the latest of the multi-arts journal.