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Job Market Candidates

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Job Market Candidates

Job Market Candidates

Sarah Carey

Sarah Carey is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy. She has been a Dissertation Fellow with the Center for Democratic Deliberation and a Graduate Student Resident in the Humanities Institute. She will defend her dissertation, titled “A Promise to Witness Faithfully: Complex Communication Across Incommensurable Differences in Lugones and Derrida” on April 18, 2024. Her dissertation brings together decolonial feminism and deconstruction to offer an elaborated account of the resistant practice Lugones names “complex communication.” Her project argues that complex communication is not only a resistant political strategy for building coalitional relations across deep social differences; in the wake of colonialism’s communicative barriers, communicating complexly is also an ethical responsibility.

Email: sjc488@psu.edu 

Areas of Specialization:

20th Century Continental Philosophy 

Feminist Philosophy 

Areas of Competency:

Ethics 

Social and Political Philosophy 

Critical Phenomenology 

Teaching Interests:

Philosophy of Film and Literature 

19th Century Continental Philosophy  

Critical Philosophy of Race 

Tiesha Cassel

Tiesha Cassel (she/they) is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and African-American and Diaspora Studies. Her dissertation, Black Feminist Worldbuilding at the Limits of Philosophy, explores Black feminist critiques of Western metaphysics through the idea of Black Feminist Worldbuilding.

Email: tac47@psu.edu

Areas of Specialization:

20th Century Continental Philosophy

Africana Philosophy

Feminist Philosophy, esp. Black Feminist Philosophy

Areas of Competency:

Critical Philosophy of Race

Critical Theory

Philosophy of Religion

Political Theology

Selected Publications:

Cassel, Tiesha. “A Genealogy of Speaking Out of Turn: Tracing the Philosophical Legacies of Black Women in America.” In Non-Canonical Women Philosophers and Feminisms. Hildesheim: Universitätsverlag: Olms Verlag, 2024.

 

Corinne Lajoie

Corinne Lajoie (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Crawford Graduate Fellow in Ethical Inquiry at the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University. Their dissertation, “Beyond Accommodation: Disability Access as a Collective Responsibility,” exposes problems with dominant conceptions of access in society, arguing that minimal compliance with the law does not yield meaningful access for disabled people. Instead, we must move beyond a focus on accommodation and treat access as a collective social responsibility.

Email: cvl5810@psu.edu

Areas of Specialization:

Ethics

Feminist Philosophy

Social Philosophy

20th Century Continental Philosophy, esp. Phenomenology

Areas of Competency:

Bioethics

Social and Political Philosophy

Philosophy of Medicine

Teaching Interests:

Existentialism

Philosophy of Trust

Disability and Technology

Selected Publications:

2021 Lajoie, C. “The Problems of Access: A Crip Rejoinder via the Phenomenology of Belonging.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 8(2): 318-337. 

2020 Lajoie, C. “Sense and Normativity: Merleau-Ponty on Levels of Embodiment and the Disorientations of Love.” Chiasmi International. Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty, 22: 393-407. 

2019 Lajoie, C. “A Critical Phenomenology of Sickness.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 23(2): 48-67. 

2019 Lajoie C. “Bodies at Home: A Feminist Phenomenology of Disorientation in Illness.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 34(3): 546-569.

 

Ashley Lamarre

Ashley Lamarre is a dual-title doctoral candidate in Philosophy and African American & Diaspora Studies and an Andrew W. Mellon Just Transformations Dissertation Fellow. She will complete her dissertation, “How do Images Hurt? Oppressive Representations and Black Feminist Redress,” in Spring 2024. Her project examines various accounts of oppressive representations, primarily stereotypical visual representations, and their contested role in upholding racist and colonial beliefs, values, and systems. It also explores the negative impact these images have on the self, the different methods for inoculating oneself against the influence of these images, and how to disturb the ongoing perpetuation of these images. To do this, she engages U.S. Black feminist thought, such as Patricia Hill Collins on controlling images, contemporary moral, social, and political philosophy on stereotypes, Frantz Fanon on cultural imposition, and related works in critical phenomenology.
Email: ajl500@psu.edu

Areas of Specialization:

Africana Philosophy
Critical Philosophy of Race
Feminist Philosophy

Areas of Competency:

Black Aesthetics

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy

Selected Publications: 

“Wake Work as Ethic: On Careful Exhibition in Slavery’s Afterlives” in Essays in Philosophy 24, no. 1-2 (2023), 58-72.

Ben Randolph

Ben Randolph is defending his dissertation in April 2023. He is a Fellow at the Rock Ethics Institute for 2022-2023, he was a Resident at the Penn State Humanities Institute for Summer 2021, and he is a Beinecke Scholar. His dissertation reconstructs Adorno’s conception of hope in conversation with Kant, Habermas, and Honneth’s alternative approaches to the concept. He has published and presented on topics in the history of philosophy, continental philosophy, social and political philosophy, and modernist literature. 

Email: bmr21@psu.edu 

Areas of Specialization:

Social and Political Philosophy, esp. Critical Theory 

20th-Century Continental Philosophy 

Areas of Competency:

Philosophy of Race 

Kant and 19th-Century Continental Philosophy  

Literary Theory 

Teaching Interests:

Ethics  

Psychoanalysis  

Theories of Capitalism and Colonialism

 

Iziah Topete

Iziah C Topete is the Sparks Fellow for 2023-2024. His dissertation, “Cugoano’s Political Theory for Redressing Slavery: Challenging Locke,” bridges his specializations in modern philosophy and critical philosophy of race. His study focuses on the African abolitionist Cugoano and his communitarian theory of natural rights vis-à-vis philosophers such as Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, and other abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp. His research agenda is to develop granular interpretations of the intellectual visions of black anti-slavery theorists to challenge the privilege philosophers place on the canonical narrative of the social contract. The contractarian position was incapable of adequately addressing the wrongs of transatlantic slavery and antebellum slavery.

Email: ict5031@psu.edu

Areas of Specialization:

History of Modern Philosophy

Critical Philosophy of Race

Kant

Areas of Competency:

Latin American Philosophy

Metaphysics

Ethics

Continental Philosophy

 

Wayne Wapeemukwa

Wayne is a Graduate Fellow at the Humanities Institute and SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship holder who will be completing his dissertation, “Partisans of the Soil: Land, Race, Capital, and Métis Dispossession,” in Spring 2023. His research reanimates dialogue between Marxism and Indigenous political theories as they engage questions of land, race, capital, and history. He specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century Marxism, its uptake among Indigenous activists, as well as Indigenous-feminist approaches to decolonization.

Email: wrw37@psu.edu

Areas of Specialization:

Social and Political Philosophy, esp. Marxism and Critical Theory

Indigenous and Decolonial Theories

19th – 20th century Continental Philosophy 

Areas of Competency:

Critical Philosophy of Race

Indigenous and Decolonizing Pedagogy 

Selected Publications: 

“Oedipal Empire: Psychoanalysis, Indigenous Peoples, and The Oedipus Complex in Colonial Context,” in Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory. Ed., Sheldon George and Derek Hook. Routledge Press. (2021) (LINK) 

“Land, Water, Mathematics, and Relationships: What Does Creating Decolonizing and Indigenous Curricula Ask of Us?” in Education Studies, v.57, no. 3, pp. 345-363. Co-authored with Dr. Hollie Kulago, Paul Guernsey, and Matthew Black. (2021) (LINK

“Contagion Castration: Lacan’s Extimacy and Fanon’s Sociogeny on Anti-Indigenous Environmental Racism and COVID-19,” Contours, Issue 10 (Summer 2020) (LINK)

 

Nicole Yokum

Nicole is currently a graduate fellow at the Humanities Institute completing her dissertation, “The Politics of Attachment: Toward a Critical Theory of Affect.” Her project explores how emotional dispositions become distorted under conditions of capitalist, racist, sexist, and heterosexist oppression, excavating resources from early critical theory in conjunction with contemporary feminist, queer and affect theory. Using attachment styles as a heuristic for interpreting modes of relating to the socio-political order, she reclaims the value of affective “pathologies” – through the lens of insecure attachment – as an ethical and politically productive response to oppression

Email: nqy5050@psu.edu

Areas of Specialization:

Social and Political Philosophy

Continental Philosophy, esp. Frankfurt School, Psychoanalysis, and Foucault

Feminist Philosophy

Areas of Competency:

Queer and Affect Theory

Critical Philosophy of Race

Ethics

Teaching Interests:

19th Century Philosophy, esp. Nietzsche

Kant, esp. First Critique

Black Feminism