I will be among the featured speakers at the Freethought Festival 2012 on the UW campus (Madison, Wisconin), sponsored by the Madison Area Coalition of Reason and Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The event runs Friday-to-Sunday, April 27 to 29 (in the Mosse Humanities Bldg,  Rm. 3650, 455 N. Park St.). I will be selling and signing copies of my books, including Proving History, which will be the subject of my talk (as far as pertains to the “historicity of Jesus”).

I’ll be speaking in the Saturday 2pm slot (April 28). The way they are packing the speakers it looks like I’ll have less than half an hour to speak and no Q&A, unfortunately. But I’ll be attending the whole conference, so interested jumbles of people can hang out with me (I am hoping to fit in a visit to Freethought Hall, though, if it will be open; in fact, if anyone there will have a car and wants to drive me over sometime during the conference, let me know!).

Registration is free, but if you will go, you should register, and as soon as possible, so they have a good head count before the event and can plan ahead (and just in case they fill up and have to send everyone away who shows up at the last minute!).

The conference line-up is chock full of cool people. Those I know personally include Darrel Ray, JT Eberhard, PZ Myers, Hemant Mehta, Annie Laurie Gaylor, and DJ Grothe. I also know Valerie Tarico, since we worked together on The Christian Delusion and The End of Christianity (she has a chapter in each). And I am familiar with Elliott Sober (I used some of his Bayesian work on the fine tuning argument in The End of Christianity) and Matt Dillahunty (a contributor here at FtB), and Ellery Schempp and James Croft by reputation. New to me (unless I met them and don’t remember; I meet a lot of people!) will be Chris Calvey, Kevin Padian, Veronica Drantz, Andrew Seidel, Sean Faircloth, Phil Ferguson, Dale McGowan, Lyz Lydell, and Alix Jules, a mix of scientists and activists. It will be a jam packed information adventure. And several of these speakers I know to be reliably entertaining. So I’m sure this will be a smashing conference!