A scholar who lives, works and researches in Scotland will give the annual Menno Simons Lectures at Bethel College, Oct. 19-20.
Dr. Kat Hill will speak on the overall theme “Diasporic Lives: Mennonites, Migration, and the Search for Home.”
The first lecture, “People, Places, Pasts: Mennonite Meanings of Home Across Time and Place,” will be Oct. 19 at 7 p.m.
The second is “Diasporic Lives and Dispersed Archives: Reading the Records of Mennonite Belonging” and will be given during Bethel’s Monday convocation, Oct. 20 at 11 a.m.
The third and final lecture, “Contested Homes and Conflicted Belonging in Mennonite Pasts,” is at 7 p.m. on Oct. 20.
All three lectures are in Krehbiel Auditorium in Luyken Fine Arts Center on campus. They are free and open to the public. All will be followed by a time of audience Q&A.
The series will focus on notions of home and belonging. Mennonites have suffered, fled, dispersed, emigrated, become refugees, moved for better opportunities, left homes, and searched for new ones.
Hill will explore the theme of home from diverse angles across a broad chronological and geographical span, thinking about ideas of family landscape, archives and rituals, bonds that keep people together, and the conflicts and contested ideas of belonging and place.
Hill’s work focuses on questions of landscape, people and heritage in various contexts from the mountain huts of the Scottish Highlands to non-conformist religious communities such as Mennonites in Europe, America and the Global South.
She is the author of the prize-winning book Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585 (Oxford University Press, 2015). Her second book, Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter, was released in spring 2024 (William Collins) and was shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing.
She is currently working on a project on global Mennonite belonging, as well as on her third book, currently titled Endlings: Last Things, Extinctions, and Endtimes.
Hill earned a Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Oxford and has received numerous grants and fellowships, including awards from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Princeton (University), and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at Edinburgh University. She lectured at Oxford, the University of East Anglia and Birkbeck College for ten years before leaving London for a life in Scotland to write and research.
The John P. and Carolina Schrag Kaufman family established the Menno Simons Lectureship Endowment to promote research and public lectures by recognized scholars relating to Anabaptist-Mennonite history, thought, life and culture, past and present. Since 1997, the family of William E. and Meta Goering Juhnke has also contributed substantially to the endowment. Both families have their roots in the Moundridge area.
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel is ranked #25 in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Regional College Midwest for 2026. Bethel was the only Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Community Healing and Transformation (TCHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see www.bethelks.edu
