PROJECTS

What We Are in Literature and Art

My book project starts from a simple observation: literature and art give us—hand us—complex material evidence of the experience of others people. This is neither a mystical nor a contentious claim about aesthetic works so long as we remember that how we come into contact with others through literature and art is wildly complex. My book argues that understanding art as evidence of life is not hopelessly old-fashioned or tethered to naïve ideas about authorship but that it points to an important challenge in the humanities today. Against many commonplaces in literary studies and in philosophical aesthetics, my book posits that a renewed interest in personhood—or in what we are—can reinvigorate questions about ethics and community. My study presses at long-standing questions about aesthetics from a new perspective: How does personhood actually unfold in creative, material works? In what unboundedly complicated ways do literary and artistic artifacts evidence experience? And why with special coherence and force?

Humanities Curriculum and Pedagogy

Humanities pedagogy and innovation in humanities curriculum are at the heart of all of my perennial interests—with an increasing urgency. I have a special interest in courses in the tradition of the liberal arts for students in the early stages of their college careers—that is, courses in writing, critical thinking, and thoughtful interpretation that lay the foundation for reflective engagement with the world beyond the confines of the classroom. I am also especially interested in working with diverse student populations, especially first-generation students, students from historically marginalized or disenfranchised groups, and nontraditional students.

Thinking of Women

This research project is about the history of women’s lives as improbable homes and unlikely hosts of thinking. It is about the history of why being a woman or being perceived to be what is called a woman makes it difficult to be someone who is understood to think—that is, someone who is understood to reflect broadly and with vital energy on important topics. This project explores the everyday history and the conceptual history of women’s exclusion from worlds of ideas. It also asks why women’s lives, undeniably, have functioned as piercing threats to theories, philosophies, and abstract ideas about “existence.”

In this project I explore portrayals of women in literature, art, film, photography, and philosophy as either incapacitated or disinclined thinkers—that is, persons who might have or could have thought but in the end do not think. These persons—women—do other things instead and are susceptible to being seduced away from thought. They engage in activities that are apparently, and importantly, exclusive of the ability to think: they fall into reverie, observe others, attend to others, labor, toil, worry, wonder, laugh, cry, cook, read things, make things, see things, and in general get caught up—wholly, irreversibly, defenselessly—in something other than thinking. I am interested in how this unsupportable history of intellectual engagement with life inflects what we think “thinking” is anyway.

Why do the activities associated with womanhood seem to discourage this activity—suddenly strange—of thinking? What do we demand of figures who think that we much less readily grant or afford women? Why is women’s often more intimate or entangled knowledge of the infrastructure of daily life an affront to the philosopher’s desire to know life? What have been the costs of bracketing her forms of knowing as actual knowledge?