Amy Allen Named Head of Philosophy at Penn State

The Department of Philosophy at Penn State is delighted to announce that Amy Allen will join its faculty as Head in July 2015.

Prof. Allen is currently finishing a book entitled The End of Progress:  De-colonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, which will be published later this year by Columbia University Press.  Her next book will explore the relationship between critical theory and psychoanalysis, focusing on the fate of the death drive in contemporary critical theory.  These two book projects are connected under the broad heading of an analysis of the relationship between power and reason in the critical theory tradition.

She is also working on several co-edited projects:  a special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy with selected papers from the 2014 SPEP conference (with Brian Schroeder of the Rochester Institute of Technology); a special issue of the journal Continental Philosophy Review on the historical a priori in Husserl and Foucault (with Smaranda Aldea of Dartmouth); an edited volume on the relationship between critical theory and psychoanalysis (with Brian O’Connor of University College Dublin); and a special section for the journal Constellations on the relationship between psychoanalysis and critical theory, drawing on work by theorists and intellectual historians (with Federico Finchelstein of the New School).

In addition to these scholarly projects, she will continue her work as the editor of the Columbia University Press series New Directions in Critical Theory and as Co-Editor in Chief of the journal Constellations:  An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. 

Prof. Allen was chair of the Department of Philosophy at Dartmouth College from 2006-2012 and is currently chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Dartmouth.