February 2008 Archives

Masato Ishida has been awarded a 2008 Graduate Student Summer Residency fellowship from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.  The award is given to eight students from the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Arts and Architecture to allow them to work full time over the summer on their research.

Given the excellent feedback we have received here. I think it might be a good use of the blog to continue to provide updates on the admissions process for those students on the waiting list.  

Melanie Shepherd, who defended her dissertation, Dislocations: Nietzsche, Autobiography, and the Writing of Bodily Events, in the Fall of 2007, has accepted a job offer from the Department of Philosophy at Misericordia University.  Melanie writes:

I am delighted to have recently accepted a position in the Department of Philosophy at Misericordia University. Misericordia is a small Catholic university in northeastern Pennsylvania, founded by the Sisters of Mercy. The Philosophy department is small but vibrant, and the majors and minors enjoy personalized attention from the faculty. I'm really excited and looking forward to this fall!

For the third year in a row, graduate students in the Philosophy department have won Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Awards, which is jointly sponsored by the Graduate School and the Office of the Vice President and Dean for Undergraduate Education.

Mary is committed to making philosophy relevant to the lives of her students. She works hard to link the critical reading, writing and thinking skills she teaches to ethical and political issues of pressing contemporary concern. She consistently encourages students to take an active role in their own education by developing assignments that place students in leadership roles in the classroom. From her use of group discussions to her ability to allow her students to articulate positions of their own, Ms. Alessandri deploys pedagogical strategies that empower students to engage the material she teaches in a sophisticated and proactive way. Further, Mary is conscientiously concerned to foster a spirit not merely of tolerance for difference, but of acceptance of and respect for diversity. As one student put it: “She has the unique ability to start and guide a discussion among her students without dictating or dominating it ….”

Alex's nominating letter reads in part: 

Mr. Stehn is committed to teaching philosophy because he believes that philosophy can have an impact on the lives of students and the world at large. His lessons are designed not only to teach specific critical thinking, reading and writing skills, but they are also designed to draw students into a life of conscience in which they learn to take responsibility for their thoughts, actions and reactions. The curriculum of his courses reflects this commitment both to the specific skills of philosophy and the larger purpose of philosophical education as part of an education in civic responsibility. One student wrote of one of Alex’s courses that it “was very insightful and life-changing, in large part because of Alex’s superior teaching methods.” Alex often uses newspaper articles or political speeches to illustrate issues in his courses and to draw them into relation with concrete and urgent social and political questions of our time. His is a teaching engaged with the world.

Congratulations to Mary and Alex!

The faculty is well into the process by which we will make final admissions decisions.  We expect to be able to offer admission to a group of students during the course of the week of February 18.  

Len Lawlor will join the Philosophy Department at Penn State in Fall 2008 as Edwin Erle Sparks Professor.  Professor Lawlor received his PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1988. His primary research and teaching interest is contemporary Continental philosophy, including Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Husserl, and Nietzsche. 

It is a great honor for me to be able to participate in the Ph.D. Program which has produced philosophers like Iris Marion Young, Cindy Willett, and Todd May. I look forward to teaching my first seminar next Fall. My first course at Penn State will concern the problem of crisis in philosophy. The primary texts we shall examine are Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences, Merleau-Ponty's The Adventures of the Dialectic, and Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy. I am excited to be able to help the Philosophy Department at Penn State continue its successful tradition.

Once again this year there will be a strong presence of graduate students from Penn State at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP).  This year's meeting will be at Michigan State University.  The program will include our own: