Sarah Carey
Sarah Carey will defend her dissertation in Spring 2023. She is a fellow with the Center for Democratic Deliberation for 2022-2023. Her dissertation brings together María Lugones’s decolonial feminism and Jacques Derrida’s 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 Competence:
Ethics
Social and Political Philosophy
Critical Phenomenology
Additional Teaching Interests:
Philosophy of Film and Literature
19th Century Continental Philosophy
Critical Philosophy of Race
Jerome Clarke
Jerome Clarke will defend his dissertation in Spring 2023. He is a Mellon Fellow for 2022-2023. His dissertation develops a practice-theoretic conception of systemic racism to evaluate the use of learning machines in social institutions, such as law enforcement and the judiciary. In so doing, his work bridges ethical and political debates in Artificial Intelligence, Black Studies, and Social Philosophy (with emphasis on the Frankfurt tradition).
Email: jac865@psu.edu
Areas of Specialization:
Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology
Areas of Competence:
Africana Philosophy, Philosophy of Race and Racism
Teaching Interests:
Ethics of Computing and Data
Hegel, Marx, and Black Philosophy
Philosophy of Social Sciences
Tano Posteraro
Tano Posteraro received his Ph.D. from Penn State in 2019 and is a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Philosophy. His dissertation on Henri Bergson and the philosophy of biology was supervised by Len Lawlor is currently under contract with Edinburgh University Press. He is co-editor, with Michael Bennett, of Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory and author of a number of articles and chapters on biological themes in 20th century continental philosophy. He maintains teaching interests in philosophies of science, technology, and environment.
Email: tano.sage@gmail.com
Areas of Specialization:
20th Century Continental Philosophy
Environmental Philosophy and Philosophy of Nature
Areas of Competency:
Philosophy of Science (including Feminist Philosophy of Science)
Philosophy of Technology
Teaching Interests:
Animal and Environmental Ethics (including Ecofeminism)
Pragmatism and American Philosophy (especially Dewey, James, and Whitehead)
Metaphysics and Epistemology
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 (Nietzsche), Kant (esp. First Critique), Black Feminism
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
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 and 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)