The Department of Philosophy in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State will welcome two new senior faculty members, including a new department head, this summer.
The new head of the department will be Amy Allen, currently chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Dartmouth. She also served as chair of the Department of Philosophy at Dartmouth College from 2006 to 2012. Allen is currently finishing a book entitled "The End of Progress: De-colonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory," which will be published later this year by Columbia University Press. Her next book will explore the relationship between critical theory and psychoanalysis, focusing on the fate of the death drive in contemporary critical theory. These two book projects are connected under the broad heading of an analysis of the relationship between power and reason in the critical theory tradition.
She is also working on several co-edited projects: a special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy with selected papers from the 2014 Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy conference (with Brian Schroeder of the Rochester Institute of Technology); a special issue of the journal Continental Philosophy Review on the historical a priori in Husserl and Foucault (with Smaranda Aldea of Dartmouth); an edited volume on the relationship between critical theory and psychoanalysis (with Brian O’Connor of University College Dublin); and a special section for the journal Constellations on the relationship between psychoanalysis and critical theory, drawing on work by theorists and intellectual historians (with Federico Finchelstein of the New School).
In addition to these scholarly projects, Allen will continue her work as the editor of the Columbia University Press series New Directions in Critical Theory and as co-editor in chief of the journal Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory.
Dr. Eduardo Mendieta, professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, will join the Penn State faculty this summer as well. He recently finished a monograph titled "The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism," which is forthcoming with SUNY Press. He is already at work on what he considers to be a prequel titled, "Philosophy’s War: Nomos, Polemos, Topos." Most immediately, however, he is editing his essays on the critical philosophy of race and will gather them under the title of "Technologies of the Racist Self."
Mendieta is also editing a couple of anthologies on the history of Latin American philosophy and its most recent developments. Future projects will focus on Latin American cities, particularly megaurbanization and megaslums, and the Anthropocene. The second project will study, profile and unearth the many ways in which philosophy is produced, crafted, thought, written, communicated and confessed: letters, dialogues, voice, diaries/autobiographies, lectures and the philosopher’s body (female, male, racialized, lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, disabled, ugly, etc). The aim is to develop a genealogy of the production of philosophy that is attentive to its material spaces of production. His guiding philosophical idea is that philosophy takes place in and through bodies that are always located in institutional spaces, which affect its imaginary.