News and Announcements

Our faculty and students are very intellectually productive and produce a wealth of scholarship in the forms of articles, lectures, and workshop talks. This all creates a lot of departmental news worthy of recognition—see below for a selection of recent news and announcements of individual accomplishments of departmental faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students.

If you are aware of any pertinent news items involving individual members of our departmental community that haven't yet been posted here, please email William Weaver at wweaver@uchicago.edu.

Undergraduate Students

2017-2018

  • Lauren Richardson has won the Lee Prize for best undergraduate essay in theoretical philosophy for her paper, "Abilities and Know-How: A Matter of Degree." She is starting at the Rutgers University PhD program in Philosophy in fall 2018.
  • Rajiv Hurhangee has won the Lee Prize for the best undergraduate essay in practical philosophy for his paper, "Essentially Rational Souls." He is starting at the University of Pittsburgh PhD program in Philosophy in fall 2018.

2016-2017

  • Tekla Kitsmarishvili has won the Epstein Prize.
  • Elek Lane is starting at the PhD Program in Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017.
  • Maya Nguen and Lauren Richardson have both been awarded the Undergraduate Lee Prize for the best essays in practical and theoretical philosophy, respectively.
  • Nathaniel Schwartz is starting at the PhD Program in Philosophy at MIT in 2017.

2015-2016

  • Kit Brennan and Eno Agolli have been awarded Dunn Summer Research Awards.
  • Ana Paz has won the Epstein Prize.

2014-2015

  • Zach Augustine received a PRISM Summer Research Grant for Summer 2015.
  • Alaina Bompiedi has been awarded the Undergraduate Lee Prize for the best essay in theoretical philosophy.
  • Colin Bradley will be attending Princeton University.
  • Sabina Bremner will be attending Columbia University.
  • Cait Duggan, Peter Goldberg and Elek Lane have been awarded Dunn Summer Research Grants for Summer 2015.
  • Edwin Jiang has received a PRISM Summer Research Grant for Summer 2015.
  • Congratulations to the following who will receive departmental honors this year: Sofi Jovanovska, Sandy Qi, Douglas Vaaler and Jake Walerius.
  • The Chicago Center for Jewish Studies BA Prize has been awarded to Noam Margalit for the best BA thesis on a topic related to Jewish Studies. 
  • Noam Margalit presented "Encountering the Neighbor: An Essay on the Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas" at the DePauw Undergraduate Ethics Symposium, and she will present "Decent Justice and Ethical Friendship in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics" at Pacific University. 
  • Clint Montgomery's paper "The Skepticism of Wittgenstein's Rule Following Problem" and Noam Margalit's paper "Decent Justice and Ethical Friendship in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics" were accepted for presentation at the Pacific University Undergraduate Conference on April 18th. 
  • Natalie Richardson (Philosophy/Allied Fields) has been awarded a Seidel Research grant for summer 2015.
  • Aaron Segal will be attending the University of Pittsburgh.
  • Gabriel Shapiro (2014) will be attending Princeton University.
  • Eric Singerman has won the Undergraduate Lee Prize for best GPA in Philosophy.
  • Eric Singerman has been awarded the Undergraduate Lee Prize for the best essay in practical philosophy.
  • Douglas Vaaler will be attending the University of Pittsburgh.
  • Sam Wigutow has accepted a fully funded PhD program offer from the Catholic University of America's School of Philosophy and will be attending in the fall.
  • Phil Yaure (2014) will be attending Columbia's philosophy PhD program. 

Graduate Students

2018-2019

2017-2018

  • Anastasia Berg's paper "Evil or Only Immature? Reconciling Freedom and the Complexity of Moral Evil" was judged to be the best graduate student submission for the year for the Southern Study Group Meeting of NAKS, held at Tulane University in New Orleans, November 9-10, 2017. The award came with a $200 Travel Stipend, and the paper was the Southern Study Group's candidate for the annual Marcus Herz Prize competition.
  • Pascal Brixel won a Division of Humanities Vigneron Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2018-19. Congratulations to Pascal!
  • Arnold Brooks has won the 2018 Dean’s Graduate Student Teaching Excellence Award. Congratulations to Arnold for winning this Division of Humanities-wide competition!
  • Charlie Capps presented “Elizabeth Anscombe and the New Natural Lawyers on the First-Person Character of Intention and Human Action,” at “God, Virtue, & Moral Absolutes: Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ at 60” (Notre Dame University, January 2018).
  • Nethanel Lipshitz taught a Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowship course in the College in Spring 2018. Nethanel also won the Department of Philosophy’s Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy for 2017-18. Congratulations Nethanel!
  • Jessica Tizzard's paper for the Midwest Study Group at the University of Minnesota, "Practical Reason and the Call to Faith," has been awarded the North American Kant Society's Markus Herz Prize for graduate student paper of the year.

2016-2017

  • Amichai Amit has won the Department of Philosophy’s Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy for 2016-17. Congratulations Amichai!
  • Amichai Amit and Thomas Schulte won Ames Dissertation Completion Fellowships for 2017-18. Congratulations to both!
  • Anastasia Berg's paper "You Can't Move without Being Moved: On the Moral Significance of The Human Capacity for Feeling" was selected for the upcoming Eastern Study Group Meeting of NAKS, to be held at George Washington University, D.C., Saturday-Sunday April 29-30. It was judged to be the best graduate student submission this year. The award comes with a $200 Travel Stipend and the paper will be the Eastern Study Group's candidate for the annual Marcus Herz Prize competition.
  • Arnold Brooks, Josh Mendelsohn, and Daniel Telech won Division of Humanities Dissertation Completion Fellowships for 2017-18. Congratulations to all!
  • Molly Brown is one of the winners of the inaugural Freund Prize for Law and Philosophy.
  • Katie Howe presented a paper, "Rescuing the Notion of the Body," at the Annual University of Toronto Graduate Student Conference in May 2017.
  • Claire Kirwin presented a paper, "Pulling Oneself Up by the Hair: Understanding Nietzsche on the Freedom of the Will," at the International Society for Nietzsche Studies annual conference in March 2017; it will be published in a special edition of Inquiry.

2015-2016

  • Jacob Butcher, Katie Howe, and Rory O’Connell won Ames Dissertation Completion Fellowships for 2016-17. Congratulations to all!
  • Dawn Chow received an honorable mention for the Chicago Center for Teaching's Excellence in Course Design Award for her course "First Year Seminar II: Skepticism," which she taught at the School of the Art Institute in Spring 2016. The Excellence in Course Design Award acknowledges graduate students' accomplishments in the area of course design. In particular, it recognizes graduate student instructors' clear and transparent organization of a course, clearly articulated plans to engage students in the classroom, and demonstrated ability to critically analyze student achievement of stated learning objectives.
  • Simon Gurofsky, Dhananjay Jagannathan, Claire Kirwin, Nethanel Lipshitz, and Francey Russell won Division of Humanities Dissertation Completion Fellowships for 2016-17. Congratulations to all!
  • We are delighted to announce that two of our graduate students have been awarded Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowships in the College for 2016-17: Nethanel Lipshitz: Moral Status: Who Deserves Moral Consideration? and Francey Russell: Feminist Moral Psychology. Congratulations Nethanel and Francey!
  • Francey Russell has also won a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship for the 2016-17 academic year.
  • Central APA News: Some of our graduate students are being honored at the Central APA, which will be held in Chicago March 2-5, 2016. The Prize Reception, to which all are invited, will be held Wednesday, March 2 7:00-8:00 PM.
    • Anastasia Berg, Katie Howe, and Francey Russell have won Graduate Student Travel Stipends. Congratulations to them all!
    • Check out their talks and talks and comments by other students and recent alumni:
      • Anastasia Berg, "Making Sense of Kant's Moral Respect: A Case for Non-Pathological Feeling" Wed. 3/2 3-4PM
      • Aidan Gray, commentator on "Inverted Commas and the Metaphysics of Reference" Fri. 3/4 3-4PM
      • Rafeeq Hasan, "Freedom and Structural Domination: Pettit and Rousseau" Thurs, 3/3 12:10-2:10PM
      • Katie Howe, "Thinking Parts and Human Animals" Fri 3/4 9-10AM
      • Francey Russell, "Kant on Self-Opacity and Self-Conceit" Wed 3/2 5-
      • Alex Silverman, commentator on "Idle Material in Spinoza's Ethics" Fri. 3/4 11AM-noon

2014-2015

  • Emilio Comay del Junco presented two papers on Aristotle: one at the 38th Annual Workshop in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin in February 2015 and at a conference on teleology in Plato and Aristotle at the University of Dayton in April 2015.
  • Jaime Edwards has been awarded a fellowship from the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values. 
  • Dhananjay Jagannathan's paper "Knowledge, Virtuous Action, and Experience" has been accepted to the APA's Eastern Division.
  • Dhananjay Jagannathan's paper "Practical Wisdom and the Prior Knowledge Requirement" has been accepted for a symposium on the main program at the APA Pacific Meeting.
  • "Course Work" -- featuring Dhananjay Jagannathan and Santiago Mejia -- is in Tableau, Spring 2015
  • Claire Kirwin won the Lee Graduate Essay Prize for her essay "“The best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived”: Understanding Nietzsche on the Freedom of the Will."
  • Nic Koziolek presented his paper “Belief, Judgment, and Rational Explanation” at the Graduate Conference on Knowing and Acting, at the University of Potsdam, in July. He presented “Inferring as a Way of Knowing” at the Annual Northwest Philosophy Conference, this year at Central Washington University, and at MindGrad, an annual graduate philosophy of mind conference at the University of Warwick.
  • "Smart Teaching Spotlight: Santiago Mejia – Collaborative Learning" - Santiago Mejia's course featured by the Chicago Center for Teaching in their newsletter.
  • Santiago Mejia presented his paper "Self-Acceptance and the Ethical Quest" at the 2015 Meeting of the North Carolina Philosophical Society.
  • Gilad Nir has been awarded a Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowship in the College for the 2015-2016 academic year, for a course "Rules and Originality: A Problem in the Philosophy of Art."
  • Gilad Nir is one of two 2015 winners of the Karen Dinal Memorial Award for excellence as a teacher of writing to first-year students (awarded by the Writing Program).
  • Gilad Nir has been awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the 2015-16 academic year.
  • Francey Russell presented a paper entitled "Repetition and Difference in Film" at Vanderbilt University, a paper entitled "Moral Self-Opacity and Self-Knowledge" at the German Philosophy Workshop, and presented a response paper for DN Rodowick's Philosophy's Artful Conversation. She will present a paper called "The Delusion of Self-Conceit and the Feeling of Respect" at a conference in Leipzig in July.
  • Francey Russell examines the controversy around Kara Walker's Marvelous Sugar Baby sculpture in the LA Review of Books.
  • Daniel Telech presented "A Virtue of 'Self-Alienation'?" at the "Virtue Ethics Through the Ages" conference at the University of Missouri- St. Louis, in March, and will give comments on Hayley Webster's paper, "Is Wine Tasting Bullshit?" at the 2nd Chicagoland Philosophy Graduate conference, at UIC in April. 
  • Tuomo Tiisala’s paper “Keeping It Implicit: A Defense of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association.
  • Jessica Tizzard has been awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the 2015-16 academic year.
  • Jessica Tizzard will be commenting on María Acosta's “On the Poetical Nature of Philosophical Writing: Schiller’s Response to Fichte” at the Chicago Area Consortium in German Philosophy on March 20, 2015.
  • Andrew Werner is presenting papers at three conferences: “Why is the World We Act in the Same World We Think About?” Conference in Honor of Stephen Engstrom, Leipzig Universität, July 15-18, 2015; “Is Logical Content a priori for Hegel?” Conference on Contemporary Debates in German Idealism, Xavier University, April 17-19, 2015; and “Hegel’s Idea: The Regressive and Progressive Method of the Logic,” Conference on Absolute Idealism, Universität Leipzig, July 16-18, 2014.

Faculty

2017-18

  • See an article on Martha C. Nussbaum's The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis on UChicago News.
  • Martha C. Nussbaum in Religion and Ethics on Getting On with Your Life: Criminal Justice that Looks Forward.
  • Tom Pashby was named a Meaker Visiting Fellow at the University of Bristol’s Institute for Advanced Study.
  • Robert Pippin was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Alumni Association of Penn State.
  • Josef Stern was a Senior Fellow at the Maimonides Institute for Advanced Studies—Jewish Skepticism of the University of Hamburg, 2017-18. He was awarded a EURIAS (European Union Research Institutes for Advanced Studies) Fellowship at the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies for 2018-19.
  • Candace Vogler was named Chair of Virtue Theory at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues (2018-2021); she will serve as a Faculty Fellow at the Royal Institute of Philosophy (2018-2021); and she served as a Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame Australia (2017).
  • Malte Willer won a Neubauer Collegium research grant for a project he’s doing with David Schloen (NELC) and Samuel Volchenboum (UChicago Medicine) entitled “An Organon for the Information Age: Ontology-Based Integration for Humanistic and Biomedical Research.”

2016-17

  • Agnes Callard received the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching on May 22, 2017. Congratulations to Agnes!
  • David Finkelstein’s interest in magic profiled in Chicago Magazine.
  • Jonathan Lear was elected as a Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
  • Jonathan Lear's Freud and Arnold Davidson's The Emergence of Sexuality are in the top-ten books on psychoanalysis in The Guardian.
  • Robert Pippin stopped by the office of Critical Inquiry recently to discuss his forthcoming essay, "Psychology Degree Zero? The Representation of Action in the Films of the Dardenne Brothers" (Critical Inquiry 41 [Summer 2015]). - Link
  • William Wimsatt is profiled in "Evolution of thought," by Helen Gregg,The University of Chicago Magazine, July–Aug/15 Link

2015-2016

  • Agnes Callard was awarded a Franke Institute of Humanities Fellowship for the academic year 2015-2016.
  • James Conant and Robert Pippin featured in "Neubauer Collegium Selects New Interdisciplinary Projects" by Susie Allen, UChicago News, February 2, 2015. - Link
  • Michael Kremer presented “A Capacity to Get Things Right: Gilbert Ryle on the Unity of Knowledge,” at a Workshop on Ryle: Intelligence, Practice, Skill, at Åbo Akademi, Turku, Finland, June 8, 2015.
  • Michael Kremer gave a keynote address, “Ryle’s 'Intellectualist Legend' in Historical Context,” at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, June 4, 2015.
  • Michael Kremer presented “Gilbert Ryle’s Fregean Inheritance,” at a Workshop on Periodisation, Relevance and Method in the History of Analytical Philosophy, at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, April 16, 2015
  • "Two Perspectives on Freud" - Jonathan Lear (with Françoise Meltzer) on the influence of Freud in their work, as told to Jeanie Chung,Tableau, Spring 2015.
  • Martha C. Nussbaum, Q & A in "For a politics of humanism," Rajgopal Saikumar,The Hindu, March 26, 2015 - Link
  • Martha C. Nussbaum named in "Top 10 Living Philosophers To Read Today," March 2015, Eno Agolli, theculturetrip.com. - Link
  • Martha C. Nussbaum is the 2015 recipient of the Inamori Ethics Prize, which will be awarded on Oct. 15, 2015.
  • Martha C. Nussbaum with Saul Levmore discuss their new book in "American Guy: Masculinity in American Law and Literature", UChicago News, October 6, 2014.
  • Bart Schultz interviewed about the Civic Knowledge Project's Life and Legacy of Dr. Julian Herman Lewis event - WBEZ Morning Shift, February 2015. - Link
  • Bart Schultz interviewed in "Life, Legacy of 'Greatest Unknown Medical Pioneer' celebrated," Maudlyne Ihejirika, Chicago Sun-Times, February 22, 2015.
  • Candace Vogler has received a major Templeton Foundation grant for her project, "Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life." The project will bring together philosophers, social scientists, and religious thinkers to examine the role of self-transcendence and self-transcendent goods in meaningful lives. This is a great opportunity for her and is also sure to enrich our departmental life with the lectures and conference the project will sponsor.
  • Malte Willer received the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching on May 25, 2016. Congratulations to Malte!
  • William Wimsatt is named a Co-PI in a major project sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, “From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics." 
  • Martha Nussbaum was will be awarded the Philip L. Quinn Prize in recognition of her service to philosophy at the Central APA.

2014-2015

  • Germany's leading newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, reviews James Conant's recent book on Nietzsche, August 26, 2014. - PDF
  • "The False Bottom in Hitchcock's Films: James Conant on Psycho", the Normative Orders Report, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, July 16, 2014. - Link
  • Arnold I. Davidson will contribute regularly to the Italian newspaper "Il Sole 24 Ore" as jazz critic for the Sunday cultural supplement, "Domenica." The most important cultural section in Italy, "Domenica" will include essays and reviews by Davidson on all aspects of jazz. His collaboration will begin in the Fall.
  • Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, Philosophy, and the College, has been appointed the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.
  • Josef Stern is the recipient of the 2014 Journal of the History of Philosophy prize for the best book in the history of philosophy published in 2013. By vote of the Board of Directors, the $5,000 prize celebrates his philosophical and scholarly achievement in bringing to light The Matter and Form of Maimonides' Guide (Harvard University Press).
    The award was established in 2006, and previous recipients are listed on the journal's     website.
  • Josef Stern has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
  • Malte Willer delivered a talk on dynamic conditionals and on metaethical noncognitivism at PhLiP 2014 in Tarrytown, NY, September 25–28 (more info here) and at the Semantic Content Workshop in Barcelona, November 6–8 (more info here).
  • William Wimsatt has won the 2015 Norman Maclean Faculty Award from the UChicago Alumni Association. - Link