Our inaugural workshop for the CUSP program was a great success. We had six excellent students from five different colleges and universities. To see a brief description of them and an indication of their interests, see here.
After a morning workshop during which we discussed the logistics of applying to graduate school, the life of the graduate student and the nature of a professional life in philosophy, we broke for lunch.
The pictures below are from the departmental lunch we had on April 28th:
Left to Right: Nancy Tuana, Latoya Gardner, Cameron Bell, Jonathan Marks, Christopher Long, Nathalie Nya, Melanie Shepherd, Stephanie Jenkins, Adrian Naranjo, Shannon Sullivan, John Christman and Ayesha Abdullah
Shannon and Ayesha talking at lunch.
Cameron, Manny and Vincent
Asad talking to Chris and John
Cameron and Chris
We have had a very successful recruiting year for the graduate program here at Penn State. Next year we will welcome eleven students into the program:
Joe Balay joins us from Seattle University. He holds a BA in philosophy and an MA in english. His interests include continental philosophy, semiotics, and American pragmatism."
Hannah Beach joins us from Boston via Connecticut after earning her Bachelor's from Colby College in Maine. She is interested in continental philosophy, especially phenomenology, Ancient philosophy, Eastern philosophy, and dinosaurs.
Deniz Durmuş comes to us from Boğaziçi University Philosophy Department where she completed her BA and MA. Her interests include continental philosophy, epistemology, feminist philosophy and gender theory.
Alastair Goff studied at the University of Sydney, Australia. Most of his interests touch on the philosophy of art and aesthetics to some degree, but he enjoys Continental philosophy in general and also dabbles in Plato from time to time.
Aaron Krempa, a Pennsylvania native, has a B.A. in philosophy and Greek from Vassar College, an M.A. from St. John's College (MD), and is in the process of completing an M.A. in philosophy and art at Stony Brook University. His primary interests include the intersection of aesthetics and ontology, continental philosophy, ancient philosophy, and ethics.
Janelle Lattimore comes to us from Douglass College at Rutgers University where she completed a her BA in philosophy with minors in political science and religion. Her interests include political philosophy, epistemology and Ancient Greek philosophy.
Shaeeda Mensah comes to us from Spelman College where she completed her BA in Sociology with minors in philosophy and women's studies. It is her goal to bridge together the fields of feminist philosophy and philosophy of race in order to establish a field known as the Philosophy of race and gender.
John Nale comes from George Washington University by way of Memphis. His research interests include Social Political Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and Critical Race Theory
Carolyn O'mara is coming from the University of Memphis. Her interests include feminist theory, gender studies, german idealism, and 20th Century French philosophy.
Camisha Russell comes to us from the University of Memphis. Her interests include ethics, social political philosophy and feminism. She works on critical race theory and African American philosophy and is specifically interested in the effects of race in issues surrounding reproductive technology.
Cori Wong earned her bachelors in philosophy at Colorado State University. Her interests are in feminist theory, social and political philosophy, and epistemology with an emphasis on knowledge of and through bodies, epistemic responsibility, and the influences of ignorance and arrogance.
Jennifer Mensch was just awarded two research grants to support her scholarship in the history of philosophy: a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society and a Kristeller-Popkin Fellowship from the Journal of the History of Philosophy.
Congratulations to Jennifer for these two awards!
On Sunday, April 27th, we will welcome the first group of participants in our annual Cultivating Underrepresented Students in Philosophy (CUSP) program. This program involves bringing a group of promising prospective graduate students in philosophy from traditionally underrepresented groups (such as, African Americans, Chicano/as and Latino/as, Native Americans, Asian Americans) to campus for a two day workshop.
During their visit, students will be exposed to the life of philosophy in the department and to the discipline of philosophy more broadly by attending workshops and lectures, speaking with graduate students and faculty, and investigating what it means to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. For more information, including instructions about how to nominate or be nominated for CUSP 2009, see the graduate program website here:
http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/graduate/cusp.shtml
We are very happy to welcome the following students to CUSP 2008:
Ayesha Abdullah is a junior in Philosophy at Trinity College interested in the history of philosophy and feminism.
Menelio Alvarez is a senior at SUNY Stony Brook interested in Phenomenology, Existentialism and Philosophy of Literature.
Cameron Bell graduated from the Richard Stockton College of NJ where he double majored in French and Philosophy. He is interested in American Pragmatism, particularly Dewey, Rorty and West, Critical Theory (Marcuse), Sartre, 20th century continental philosophy and the philosophy of language.
Latoya Gardner is currently is a first-year MA student in the UNC Charlotte Philosophy Department's Masters of Ethics and Applied Philosophy program. She received her BA in Political Science and Philosophy from UNC Charlotte in December 2003. She describes her philosophical interests as ethics, moral philosophy, Nietzsche, and social/political philosophy.
Asad Naqvi is the president of the Undergraduate Philosophy Club at SUNY Stony Brook. His interests include the history of philosophy, ontology and aesthetics, 19th century philosophy, phenomenology and thinkers like Nietzsche, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault and Irigaray.
Adrian Naranjo is currently a senior at Florida International University, majoring in both Philosophy and English. His interests include the history of philosophy, Heidegger, Tragedy, Aristotle, Nietzsche.
Nancy Tuana, DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor in Ethics, Professor of Philosophy, Humanities and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Rock Ethics Institute, has been named the Society of Women in Philosophy’s 2008 Distinguished Woman Philosopher.
Begun in 1984, this annual award honors a woman philosopher whose contributions to the support of women in philosophy and to philosophy itself are outstanding and merit special recognition. A panel and reception celebrating Professor Tuana’s accomplishments will be organized for the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in
Congratulations to Nancy for this excellent honor!
Congratulations to Mary Alessandri for receiving a Fulbright Award to study in Spain during the 2008-2009 academic year. She will be studying at the Unamuno archive, which is called the “Casa-Museo de Unamuno” in Salamanca, Spain. Although it is affiliated with the University of Salamanca, the archive is located in what was Unamuno's house.
Mary's primary work will be to research what Unamuno called “Quixotism” which he considers to be a kind of philosophy and religion. Her research at the archive will add substantively to her dissertation which compares Unamuno's work with Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity.
Professor Robert Bernasconi will join the philosophy faculty at Penn State in Fall 2009 as Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy. Professor Bernasconi’s primary research and teaching interests lie in critical philosophy of race, particularly in relation to the history of philosophy, and Continental philosophy, especially figures such as Sartre, Levinas, and Heidegger. He is the author of How to Read Sartre (W.W. Norton, 2007), Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (Humanities Press, 1993), and The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Humanities Press, 1985).
Professor Kathryn Gines will join the philosophy faculty at Penn State in Fall 2008. In 2008-09 she will be a Philosophy and Africana Research Center Post-doctorate Fellow and beginning fall 2009 she will be an Assistant Professor in Philosophy. Professor Gines’s primary research and teaching interests lie in Continental philosophy, Africana Philosophy, and Philosophy of Race and Gender, and she focuses on figures such as Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Fanon, and Anna Julia Cooper.
For more information on Professor Gines, click here.
Professor Gines has published articles on race thinking in Arendt’s work, questions of assimilation, and sex and sexuality in contemporary hip-hop, and she currently is working on two monographs entitled Rethinking France: Racism, Colonialism, and Violence and Hannah Arendt and the "Negro Question."
In 2007, Professor Gines organized the first annual Collegium of Black Women Philosophers. Last year, the Collegium received excellent press coverage here in the Philadelphia Inquirer and here in the Chronicle of Higher Education during its inaugural conference in the spring of 2007. The next meeting of the Collegium will be held at Penn State University in spring 2009.
The Lyceum asked Professor Gines to comment on how she feels about joining the department. Here is what she said:
I am delighted to be joining the Philosophy Department at Penn State University. I appreciate this department’s commitment to the history of philosophy and the fact that it offers a curriculum designed to promote discourse across philosophical traditions and international borders. Furthermore, I look forward to participating in and contributing to a program that is committed to an inclusive model for doing philosophy.
We are very excited to welcome Kathryn to the department.
Henry Wang has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, GA. His dissertation was entitled Conscience and Ethics, Thinking across the limits of Normativity. Henry writes:I am delighted to have accepted a position in the department of History, Geography and Philosophy at Georgia College and State University. This is a small but dynamic department and its teaching and research orientations are in good accord with my own specialties, ie. Continental and Asian Philosophy.
I am especially excited to have the freedom to design upper level courses that will bring the Western and Eastern traditions into active dialogue with each other.
We want to congratulate Henry on his successful placement and wish him great success in his future endeavors. Henry has been an extremely productive and conscientious member of our department and he will be missed.
Bryan Lueck, who defended his dissertation in 2007 entitled, Imperative Sense and Libidinal Event, has accepted a position in the Philosophy Department at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville. Bryan writes:I am very happy to have accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. SIUE is a part of the Southern Illinois University system and is located approximately 20 miles outside of St. Louis, MO. I am especially excited about the opportunity I will have there to teach regularly in my area of specialization (Contemporary Continental Philosophy).
I am grateful to the Department of Philosophy at Penn State for doing so much to help me get to this point and I am extraordinarily proud to have earned my Ph.D. here.
We congratulate Bryan for this excellent placement. SIU Edwardsville is fortunate to have such an accomplished teacher and thorough scholar. His thoughtful contributions to the department and excellent sense of humor will be missed.
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