Mentor Bios – 2013 Workshop

Amy Allen is the Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research interests are in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, social and political theory, and feminist theory. In particular, she works at the intersection of French poststructuralism, the Frankfurt School, and feminism on topics such as power, agency, subjectivity, autonomy, history and normativity. She is the author of two books: The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity (1999) and The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (2008). She is the Co-Editor in Chief of the journal Constellations, series editor of the Columbia University Press book series New Directions in Critical Theory, and Executive Co-director of SPEP, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.

Louise Antony is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her B.A. from Syracuse University in 1975, and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982. Prof. Antony has research interests in the philosophy of mind, naturalistic epistemology, feminist theory, and the philosophy of religion. She has edited or co-edited three volumes: A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (with Charlotte Witt) and Chomsky and His Critics (with Norbert Hornstein), and Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life. She has contributed to the New York Times blog, “The Stone,” and to the popular website AskPhilosophers.org.

Ann Cudd is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean for Humanities at the University of Kansas. She received her BA from Swarthmore College and her MA in Economics and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Her main areas of research are in social and political philosophy, philosophy of economics, and feminist philosophy. Cudd has authored over 50 articles in journals such as the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Hypatia, the Journal of the Philosophy of Social Science, Philosophy and Economics, and the Southern Journal of Philosophy. Books include Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate (co-authored with Nancy Holmstrom; Cambridge, 2011) and Analyzing Oppression (Oxford, 2006). She is the co-editor of Hypatia for value theory, and co- founder, with Louise Antony, of the Mentoring Project.

Janice Dowell is an associate professor at Syracuse University. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2002. Her primary areas of research interest are philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and metaethics. Her published work has focused primarily on issues in the metaphysics of mind. Currently, her work focuses on defending Kratzer’s canonical contextualist semantics for modal expressions against a series of recent challenges. As a part of this project, she is in the early stages of work on a book on deontic modals.

Julia Driver is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. Here primary areas of research interest are in normative ethical theory and moral psychology. He has published three books, the most recent, Consequentialism, with Routledge in 2012. She has published articles in a variety of journals such as the Journal of Philosophy, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Hypatia, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. She is an Associate editor for Ethics, and a co-editor for the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. She is currently working on Humean accounts of moral agency, and moral complicity.

Brie Gertler: I am a Professor in the Corcoran Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. I have previously taught at the University of Wisconsin and at the College of William and Mary. I earned my BA from Swarthmore College, my MA from the University of Pennsylvania and my Ph.D. from Brown University. My research focuses on issues in the philosophy of mind, including self-knowledge, mental content, and consciousness. In addition to my articles in these areas, I have published a book, Self- Knowledge (Routledge, 2011). I am currently at work on a manuscript with the working title Mental Individualism, in which I argue that, if there is a principled way to distinguish what lies within the mind from what falls outside of it, then minds -- and, consequently, selves -- are more restricted (less extended) than ordinarily supposed.

Karen Neander is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. She received her PhD from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Her primary research interests are in philosophy of mind and the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, as well as in related areas in philosophy of biology. She is currently putting the finishing touches to a book (under contract with MIT Press) that is tentatively titled. The Emergence of Content: Naturalizing the Representational Power of the Mind. Her published papers are on topics that include mental content, representational theories of consciousness, pictorial representation, biological functions and natural selection.

Kathryn J. Norlock writes and teaches on ethics, feminist philosophy, environmental philosophy and sociopolitical issues. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001, after wandering in with a B.A. in Political Science from Northern Illinois University. Prior to coming to Trent University, she held a professorship at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her recent works include Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective (Lexington Books, 2008), “Forgiveness and Environmental Ethics,” in Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (2009), and “A Moral Imperative: Retaining Women of Color in Education,” co-authored with Profs. Angela Johnson and Sybol Cook Anderson, in Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal (2009). With Prof. Andrea Veltman of James Madison University, Kathryn co- edited a special issue of Hypatia (Winter 2009), “Oppression and Agency: Essays in Honor of Claudia Card,” as well as the anthology, Evil, Political Violence and Forgiveness (Lexington Books, 2009).

Alison Simmons is Harvard College Professor and Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, where she has been teaching since 1994. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research centers on early modern theories of mind, including theories of consciousness, mental representation, and sensory perception. Her teaching extends into earlier medieval philosophy and later theories of mind, the relation between mind and body, and philosophy of psychiatry. She is currently working on two books: one explores the nature of the human being in Descartes; the other is an edited volume on the life of the concept of consciousness for the new series, Oxford Philosophical Concepts.