Recent News

Long Receives ETS Summer Faculty Fellowship

Professor Christopher Long was awarded a 2009 Education Technology Services Summer Faculty Fellowship. The project that was funded, Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue, is designed to explore the opportunities digital expression offers to enhance, deepen, expand and promote his academic scholarship in philosophy by focusing on issues related to the Socratic practice of politics. To read more, click here.

North American Kant Society - April 24-25, 2009

The sixth annual meeting of the Eastern Study Group of the North American Kant Society will be held at Penn State University on April 24-25, 2009. Eckart Förster (The Johns Hopkins University) and Robert Bernasconi (University of Memphis/Penn State University) will be keynote speakers. For more information including the full conference program, click here.

Collegium of Black Women Philosophers - May 1, 2009

The second conference of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (CBWP) will be held on Friday May 1, 2009 at Penn State University in the Hintz Alumni Center. Welcoming Remarks will be offered at 8:45 am, Conference Papers will be presented throughout the day beginning at 9:00 am, and the Keynote Address by Michele Moody-Adams, Ph.D. of Cornell University will be given at 4:45 pm. These events are free and open to the public. For more information, including the full conference program, please visit the CBWP web site: Collegium of Black Women Philosophers.

Graduate Student Wins College Teaching Award

Jared Hibbard-Swanson has received the 2008-2009 College of the Liberal Arts Outstanding Teaching Award for Graduate Students. Jared is the eighth student from the philosophy department to have won recognition for exceptional teaching in the past four years. For more information on Jared's excellent teaching, click here.

Cultivating Underrepresented Students in Philosophy (CUSP) program continues in Spring 2009

CUSP is an all-expense paid 2-day workshop held at the Philosophy Department at the Pennsylvania State University each April for up to eight promising prospective graduate students in philosophy from traditionally underrepresented groups (such as African Americans, Chicano/as and Latino/as, Native Americans, Asian Americans). For information on eligibility and application process, click here.

Philosophy Faculty Receives Research Grants

Jennifer Mensch, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society and Philosophy, recently received 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.

Robert Bernasconi Joins Faculty

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).  He is the editor or co-editor of thirteen books, including Race, Hybridity, and Miscegenation (Thoemmes, 2005), Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Indiana UP, 2003), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge UP, 2002), Race (Blackwell, 2001), The Idea of Race (Hackett, 2000) and Re-Reading Levinas (Indiana UP, 1991).

Kathryn Gines Joins Faculty

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.  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 (for more information, see http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i05/05b00401.htm).  The next meeting of the Collegium will be held at Penn State University in spring 2009.

Leonard Lawlor Joins Faculty

Professor Leonard Lawlor will join the philosophy faculty at Penn State in Fall 2008 as Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy.  Professor Lawlor’s primary research and teaching interests lie in Continental philosophy, especially figures such as Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Husserl, and Nietzsche.  He is the author of multiple books, including This is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (Columbia, 2007), The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life (Fordham, 2006), Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Indiana, 2003), The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (Continuum Books, 2003), Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Indiana, 2002), and Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida (SUNY Press, 1992). He also is co-editor of Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty.

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