Each year, the Philosophy Department invites one of our Ph.D alumni to give the Alumni Lecture as part of our annual graduate recruitment event. Past alumni speakers have included Kym McLaren, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University (2017) and Hasana Sharp, Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University (2018).
The 2019 Alumni Lecture was presented by Robert Pippin (Ph.D. Penn State, 1974). Prof. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important books on topics ranging from German idealism to philosophy of film and literature. His most recent books are The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness (2017) and Hegel’s ‘Realm of Shadows’: Logic as Metaphysics in the Science of Logic (2018). A past winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Pippin has also received the Alumni Fellow Award from the Penn State Alumni Association (2018) and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Penn State Graduate School Alumni Association (2019).