NB: The following information is from 2013, and may no longer be current.

Sonia Baez-Hernandez (MFA)

Sonia is a visual artist, filmmaker, scholar, human rights advocate, and formerly artist-in-residence for Service Employees International Union (SEIU) from Miami, FL. Most recently, Baez-Hernandez’ produced an award-winning film, “Territories of the Breast,” that courageously explores difficult questions about human rights and healthcare. Puerto Rican and Dominican by heritage, migrant by choice, she works at the borders of aesthetics, critical theory, immigrant experiences, health care as a human right, and embodiment. As an Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (ACSJL) Visiting Fellow, she will focus on art, gender, embodiment, health disparities, and issues of citizenship and access to social resources. As an activist survivor of breast cancer, Baez-Hernandez centers her current work on the political economy of healthcare, who has it, who doesn’t, who owns it, and why. During her Fellowship at ACSJL, she will not only research, write, and produce artworks but also conduct workshops with students, faculty, and community members. With Spanish as her first language, she will add greatly to our Spanish-speaking community on campus. She plays a key role in the new ACSJL Concentrations Initiative in Art, Social Justice, and Critical Theory developed by Professor of Philosophy, Christopher Latiolais.

Richard Eldridge

Dr. Eldridge is the Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College. He has held visiting appointments at Brooklyn, Freiburg, Erfurt, Bremen, Stanford, and Essex. He is the author of five books, including most recently Literature, Life, and Modernity (2008) and An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (2003), and over 75 articles in aesthetics, Wittgenstein studies, Hegel studies, and philosophy and literature. He has edited four volumes, including most recently Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies (with Bernard Rhie, 2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (2009).

Veronique Fóti

Dr. Ftói is a professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, having previously taught at the New School for Social Research (now New School University). She is the author, most recently, of Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology (Northwestern University Press, May, 2013), and, previously, of Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Tragedy (2006), Vision’s Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations (2003), and Heidegger and the Poets: Poiesis, Sophia, Techn­e (1992). She has also edited Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting (1996) and is the author of articles and book chapters on contemporary continental philosophy, Seventeenth-century rationalism, aesthetics, and ancient Greek philosophy.

Dr. Adriana Garriga-Lopez

Dr. Garriga-Lopez is a poet, anthropologist, and performance artist. She has published poems and scholarly texts in Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, and in New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Her poetry and fiction have also been featured in Ad Hoc, The Columbia Review, Beyond Polarities, and Piso 13. Garriga-López was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She received a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Literature from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (2001,) where she co-founded LLEGO! (The Queer People of Color Student Union of Rutgers University.) She trained as a graduate student at the History of Consciousness Board of the University of California, Santa Cruz (2000-2002.) She holds Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University (2010.) Her ethnographic research focuses on the effects of US colonialism in Puerto Rico and the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Caribbean. Her theoretical interests include Caribbean social criticism; decolonial, postcolonial, and subaltern theory; theories of the body; Freud and sexuality; critical theory; and theories of sovereignty and imperialism. In 2009, she published “What Can We Expect from Obama?” in the blog Re/envisioning the Diaspora. In 2010, her dissertation Viral Citizens: The Coloniality of HIV/AIDS in Puerto Rico was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Puerto Rican Studies Association in its first ever Dissertation Award Competition. In 2011 Viral Citizens was chosen by the Anthropologyworks blog as one of the Top 40 North American dissertations in cultural anthropology of 2010. As Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Garriga-López teaches courses on Latin America and the Caribbean, epidemics and public health, gender and sexuality, medical anthropology, medical sociology, and social theory that center on social injustices and histories of community activism. In 2011, she organized “Just Words: Poetry for Social Justice,” a three-day encuentro that brought internationally renowned poets Cheryl Clarke, Willie Perdomo, and Staceyann Chin, and the Kalamazoo community together to think, talk, and write about social justice issues.

Alison Geist

Alison did her graduate and undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, where she later worked at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) in the Center for Research on the Utilization of Scientific Knowledge. At ISR she coordinated a study of Michigan’s Criminal Sexual Conduct Statute, and is author, with Jeanne Marsh and Nathan Caplan, of Rape and the Limits of Law Reform (Jossey-Bass, 1982). Also at ISR, Ms. Geist worked on a study of social problem definitions in the social sciences, an analysis of US mental health policy in the 1970s and 80s, and a study of Indochinese “boat people” in the US. She then lived in Morocco for about six years, first as a Peace Corps Volunteer working with her colleague and spouse, Gary S. Gregg, in the villages of the High Atlas Mountains and pre-Sahara. There she created an integrated rural development project focused on women’s and children’s health, and became Director of the Near East Foundation, which she established there, and which continues today. Ms. Geist later worked at Tufts New England Medical Center at The Health Institute where she coordinated a multidisciplinary, five-university qualitative study of Ethnicity and Well-Being. She joined Kalamazoo College in 1997, first as its Director of Summer Programs. Later, with faculty and community partners, she helped establish the Campus Community Partnership, which has become the endowed Underwood Stryker Institute for Service-Learning.

Paul Guyer

Dr. Guyer came to Brown University in 2012 as the inaugural Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1974, and taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois-Chicago before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught for thirty years. At University of Pennsylvania, he was the Florence R. C. Murray Professor in the Humanities. He has also been a visiting professor at Michigan, Princeton, and Harvard. His interests include all areas of the philosophy of Kant, modern philosophy more generally, and the history of aesthetics. He is the author of nine books on Kant, including Kant and the Claims of Taste (1979), Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (1987), Kant (2006), Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (2007), and Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume (2008). He is the editor of six anthologies of work on Kant, including three Cambridge Companions, and is co-editor of a volume on the work of his teacher Stanley Cavell. He is also the co-translator of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and Kant’s Notes and Fragments, all in the Cambridge Edition of Immanuel Kant, of which he is General Co-Editor. He is on numerous editorial boards, including those of The Kantian Review, Kant-Studien, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His three-volume work, A History of Modern Aesthetics, will be published shortly by Cambridge University Press. His next project is a study of the impact of Kant’s moral philosophy on the subsequent history of philosophy for a series titled, The Legacy of Kant, he is editing for Oxford University Press. He has recently completed terms as President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and President of the American Society for Aesthetics. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a recipient of the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung.

Christine Hahn

Dr. Hahn is assistant professor of Art History at Kalamazoo College. Her research focuses on how expatriate artists, traveling exhibitions, and the museum site shaped both personal and political identity in the mid-20th century.

Dr. Amelia Katanski

Dr. Katanski is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Kalamazoo College where she teaches courses in American Indian Literatures, and multi-ethnic United States literature, as well as service-learning courses that focus on food: “RTW: A Seat in the Garden,” is a course that examines gardens in literature; and “Cultivating Community,” a first-year seminar that studies alternatives to the industrial food system. Dr. Katanski received a BA in English from Kalamazoo College; an MA and Ph.D. in English from Tufts University, and an MA in American Indian Studies from UCLA. She has taught at Kalamazoo College since 2000. She is the author of Learning to Write “Indian”: The Boarding School Experience and American Indian Literature (2005) and several articles on American Indian authors and on the dialogic relationship between Native literature and both federal and tribal customary law. Her current research explores intersections among storytelling, tribal sovereignty, and food sovereignty in Great Lakes American Indian communities, and she is supported in this work by an ACSJL Faculty Fellowship.

Michael Kelly

Dr. Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (Columbia UP, 2012); Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge UP, 2003); and is currently writing a book on the aesthetics and politics of participatory art. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the (Oxford UP, 1998; expanded 2nd edition forthcoming). And he is the former Executive Director of the American Philosophical Association, and former Managing Editor of the Journal of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he also taught for16 years.

Shanna Salinas

Dr. Salinas is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department, where she teaches 19th, 20th, and 21st-Century American Literary and Cultural Studies, American Race and Ethnicity, and Chicana/o Literature. She received her B.A. in American Literature and Culture, with a minor in Chicana/o Studies, from University of California, Los Angeles, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current book project, Mirrored Identities: Race, Nation, and the U.S.-Mexico Border in American Literature, examines the mutually dependent and cooperative relationship between U.S. national identity and Chicana/o racial identity as negotiated through the geopolitical and psychosocial configuration of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Conor McGrady

Conor is an artist from Northern Ireland whose work examines the relationship between ideology, individual and collective psychology, and the politics of spatial control. He received a BA Hons from the University of Northumbria, Newcastle, UK, and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. He has exhibited internationally, with one-person exhibitions in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, and Zagreb. Group exhibitions include the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York and the Biennale of Contemporary Art, D-0 Ark Underground, Sarajevo-Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Editor of Curated Spaces in the journal Radical History Review, his writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Ruminations on Violence (Waveland Press, 2007) State of Emergence (Plottner Verlag, 2011) and State in Time (Drustvo NSK Informativni Center, Ljubljana and Dolenjski Muzej, Novo Mesto, 2012). He lives and works in New York City and The Burren, Co. Clare, Ireland.

Elizabeth Millán

Dr. Millan was educated at The State University of New York at Buffalo and at the Eberhard-Karls Universität in Tübingen. She works on aesthetics, German Idealism/Romanticism and Latin American Philosophy. Before coming to DePaul, Elizabeth taught at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela. She has held fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the author of Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (SUNY, 2007), guest editor, with Hugo Moreno, of a special volume on Latin American Aesthetics for Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (Vol. 18, No. 2, Fall 2014) and with John Smith of Goethe and German Idealism, special volume of Goethe Yearbook (2011) (she also has an article in that volume, “The Quest for the Seeds of Eternal Growth: Goethe and Humboldt’s Presentation of Nature”). Together with Bärbel Frischmann, she edited The New Light of German Romanticism (Schöningh Verlag, 2008). Recent articles include: “Alexander von Humboldt’s Role in the Decolonization of Spanish America” for the special volume Alexander von Humboldt’s American Journey, edited by Christine Knoop and Oliver Lubrich (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Publishers, 2012); “Zu Friedrich Schlegels Auseinandersetzung mit Spinoza und dem Spinozismus,” co-authored with Bärbel Frischmann for a special volume on Spinoza and German Idealism and Romanticism, edited by Violetta Waibel (Frankfut: Meiner Verlag, 2012); and “Forgetfulness and Foundationalism: Schlegel’s Critique of Fichte’s Idealism,” Fichte-Studien, special supplement on Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010). Elizabeth is currently finishing a book-length study in which she argues Alexander von Humboldt is best understood as a romantic critic of nature.

Martin Seel

Dr. Seel is Professor of philosophy at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt/Main. His main fields of research are epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, virtue ethics, art theory, and aesthetics in general. He has written numerous book, among them Eine Ästhetik der Natur, Frankfurt/M. 1991; Versuch über die Form des Glücks, Frankfurt/M. 1995; Ästhetik des Erscheinens, München 2000 (Aesthetics of Appearing, Stanford UP 2004); Sich bestimmen lassen. Studien zur theoretischen und praktischen Philosophie, Frankfurt/M. 2002; Paradoxien der Erfüllung. Philosophische Essays, Frankfurt/M. 2006; Die Macht des Erscheinens. Texte zur Ästhetik, Frankfurt/M. 2007; Theorien, Frankfurt/M. 2009; 111 Tugenden, 111 Laster. Eine philosophische Revue, Frankfurt/M. 2011; Die Künste des Kinos, Frankfurt/M. 1013 (forthcoming in September).

Sandra Shapshay

Dr. Shapshay is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington. She specializes in 19th-Century German philosophy, especially Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as contemporary environmental aesthetics, and relationships between aesthetics and ethics. Recent articles include “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime” in the British Journal of Aesthetics (2013),
“Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian Sublime” in Kantian Review (2012), and “Aesthetic and Moral Freedom in Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics” co-authored with Alex Neill, forthcoming in the International Yearbook of German Idealism. Currently, she is hard at work on a book that seeks to reconstruct Schopenhauer’s ethical thought.

Eeva Sharp

Eeva is a senior Art History major at Kalamazoo College. She came to Kalamazoo by way of Belgium and Northern Michigan where she attended an art school to study Jazz trumpet, dance, and theater. She studied abroad in Strasbourg, France where she learned the history of French gastronomy and foraged mushrooms in the Vosges mountains. She also created a comparative study of mushroom foraging cultures in Northern Michigan and Alsace as part of her Integrated Culture Research Project. During her time at college, Eeva has interned with the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and the New York Municipal Archive. She is the Liaison to the Arts and Media Guild with the Center for Career and Professional Development and created the position of Student Curator in conjunction with the Office of Student Involvement. The focus of her work in the arts has always been around issues of access within the art world. In creating the position for a student curator, she hopes to ensure on-going student leadership in the arts and create more opportunities for students to see themselves reflected in the aesthetic space of the campus. For her Senior Individualized Project, she curated an exhibition titled “A Gaudy Rome or an Innocent Eden: Early twentieth century portraiture from the Kalamazoo College Collection”. That project highlighted the tension between the depiction of a powerful biographical individual and shifts in the technique and technology of art making at the turn of the twentieth century. In using works taken off the walls and out of storage in this institution, this exhibition also demonstrated ways in which the permanent collection of the college could be reactivated to re-engage the college with the aesthetic space of this educational institution. After graduation, Eeva plans to move to New York City to pursue an opportunity to work with the Conservation Department of the New York Municipal Archive and continue to find ways to engage the arts in that cultural hub.

David Strauss

Dr. Strauss is professor emeritus of history at Kalamazoo College, where for twenty-nine years he taught courses in American cultural and diplomatic history. He recently published Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America,1934-1961 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)

Dan S. Wang

Dan is a writer, blogger, and artist living in Madison, Wisconsin, who works alone and in groups. His research and projects concern matters of resistance and liberation, global identities, and the spatial organization of power.

Paul Wittenbraker

Paul is an Associate Professor of Art and Design at Grand Valley State University, where he founded the Civic Studio project in 1999. He is a graduate of Wabash College and earned his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Previous positions include director of gallery and lecture programs at Kendall College of Art and Executive Director of the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts. While director at UICA, he served on the board of the National Association for Artists Organizations during the NEA controversies. In 2006 he developed an undergraduate studio major called Visual Studies. The major incorporates contextual, social, curatorial, and digital cultural practices. He is currently developing a new platform for cultural research called the Office for Public Culture with the support of the Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies at GVSU.

Lambert Zuidervaart

Dr. Zuidervaart is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies and Professor of Philosophy, status only, at the University of Toronto, where he is an associate member of the graduate faculty in philosophy. His primary scholarly interests lie in continental philosophy, critical theory, hermeneutics, social philosophy, and philosophy of art, with emphases on Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, and Habermas. He is currently conducting research into theories of truth and theories of globalization. His most recent books, all published by Cambridge University Press, include Artistic Truth (2004), Social Philosophy after Adorno (2007), and Art in Public (2011). Prior publications on the Frankfurt School include Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (1991) and The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (edited with Tom Huhn, 1997), both published by The MIT Press.