Where Are They Now

Dr. Shane Ewegen is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College (Hartford, CT). He received his PhD from Boston College in 2011, where he wrote his dissertation – Playing with Words: Plato’s Cratylus and the Comic Unfolding of Language – under the direction of John Sallis (with Marina McCoy (BC) and Robert Metcalf (CU Denver) as readers). He is the author of Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language (Indiana University Press, 2013); his second book, The Way of the Platonic Socrates, is forthcoming in 2019 (with Indiana University Press). Additionally, Dr. Ewegen has published several articles on Plato, as well as several articles on the work of Martin Heidegger. Dr. Ewegen is also co-translator (along with Dr. Julia Goesser Assaiante of Trinity College) of Martin Heidegger’s Heraclitus (forthcoming in 2019 with Bloomsbury Publishing). He is currently co-translating Martin Heidegger / Karl Löwith: Briefwechsel (1919-1973) with Dr. Julia Goesser Assaiante (under contract with Rowman and Littlefield).

Brian Treanor defended his dissertation, under the supervision of Richard Kearney and Jacques Taminaux, in 2001. He is currently Charles S. Casassa, SJ Chair and Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. He is also an affiliated faculty member in Environmental Studies, and the former Director of the university’s Environmental Studies Program, which he founded. He is currently the Director of LMU’s Academy for Catholic Thought and Imagination, and interdisciplinary institute focused on scholarship and intellectual community engaged with Catholic intellectual traditions. He has been honored with several awards for his teaching—at Boston College and at Loyola Marymount—and is the author of two books: Emplotting Virtue (SUNY 2014) and Aspects of Alterity (Fordham 2006), as well as the co-editor of Carnal Hermeneutics (Fordham 2015), Being-in-Creation (Fordham 2015), Interpreting Nature (Fordham 2013), and A Passion for the Possible (Fordham 2010). Additionally, he is the co-editor of Fordham University Press’ series Groundworks: Ecological Issues in Philosophy and Theology.

Serena Parekh received her doctorate from BC in 2005. The title of her dissertation is The Phenomenological Analysis of Human Rights in the Work of Hannah Arendt, directed by James Bernauer, David Rasmussen, and Jacques Taminiaux. She is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University (tenured). She has two books published, Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement (Routledge, 2017), and Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights (Routledge, 2008). Additionally, she is co-editor of Refugee Crisis: The Borders of Human Mobility (Routledge, 2018). At Northeastern, she is the director of The Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program. Additionally, she is the editor of the APA Newsletter of Feminism and Philosophy.

Joseph J. Tanke is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Director of the International Cultural Studies Program at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where he earned tenure in 2012. Dr. Tanke completed his dissertation, Michel Foucault and Visual Culture, under the supervision of Fr. James Bernauer at Boston College in 2007. Dr. Tanke has published widely on topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy. His major publications include: Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (Continuum, 2009) and Jacques Rancière: Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics (Continuum, 2011). In 2012, Tanke published (with Dr. Colin McQuillan) the Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics, a textbook that has been widely adopted for courses pertaining to the philosophy of art and literary theory. Dr. Tanke is the editor of the series for Global Aesthetic Research at Rowman and Littlefield, a book series dedicated to publishing the latest research in the field of aesthetics. During the summers of 2013 and 2014, Dr. Tanke organized a series of special research seminars at the Center for Aesthetics and Aesthetic Education at Peking University in Beijing. And during the fall of 2014, Dr. Tanke was awarded the Critical Studies and Humanities Fellowship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Dr. Tanke is working on a new monograph that analyzes the emergence, reception, and contemporary relevance of Kantian aesthetics, Castles in the Sky: Aesthetics as a Useful Fiction.

Dalia Nassar received her doctorate from BC in 2007. Under the direction of Vanessa Rumble (BC) and Fred Beiser (Syracuse), Nassar wrote her dissertation on The Ontology of Presentation: The Infinite and Finite in German Romantic Philosophy. She is currently tenured as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Recent publications of Nassar’s include The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in German Romantic Philosophy, 1795-1804 (Chicago, 2014), and a project in progress on Romantic Empiricism. Additionally, Nassar is editor of The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays of German Romantic Philosophy (OUP, 2014) and an anthology of works by German women philosophers in the nineteenth century (under contract, OUP). In addition to these publications, Nassar is the recipient of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (2016-2018), the Ernst and Rosemarie Keller Award (2015), and the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (2012-2014), among many others.

James Taylor is a founding director of the European Center for the Study of War and Peace, a lecturer in philosophy at Gordon College, and the Director of the Balkans Semester. He received his doctorate in philosophy from Boston College (2016), and holds an MA from Loyola Marymount University and a BA from Gordon College. His dissertation, entitled The Ethics of Subjectivity: Activity and Passivity Through Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Askesis, was directed by Richard Kearney, with Jeffrey Bloechl (BC) and Mark Gedney (Gordon College) as readers. He specializes in the “ethics of transformation” at the political, religious, and personal levels, and in the possibilities for reconciliation afforded by intercultural and interreligious dialogue. He is the editor (with Richard Kearney) of the volume Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions (Continuum 2011) that examines the possibility of transformation through dialogue between the five major religious traditions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. He is the guest editor of a special edition of the journal Philosophy and Social Criticism on the subject of “Heidegger and Politics” (2013) and he has published on spirituality and ethics in New Arcadia Review and International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology.

Neal DeRoo (Class of 2009) wrote his dissertation Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas and Derrida under the supervision of Richard Kearney and with Jeffrey Bloechl and John Caputo as readers; it was later published by Fordham University Press. He has co-edited four books: Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art (Fordham, 2013), Religion and Perception (with Kascha Semonovitch, BC Class of 2009) (Continnum, 2010), Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now (with John Panteleimon Manoussakis, BC Class of 2005) (Ashgate, 2009), Cross and Khora: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Pickwick Pub, 2009), and The Logic of Incarnation: James K.A. Smith's Critique of Postmodern Religion (Pickwick Pub, 2008). He is currently working on a project developing the concept of expression in phenomenology for use as the basis of a material account of spirituality. He currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Religion and is Associate Professor of Philosophy (tenured) at The King’s University, Edmonton, Canada.

Sarit Larry received her PhD from Boston College in 2016 under the direction of Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen as reader. The title of her dissertation is Trigger Narrative A Perspective on Radical Political Transformations. Sarit is the Jewish Co-Director of Mahapach-Taghir, a Jewish-Palestinian Feminist NGO working with peripheral communities in Israel and promoting equal socio-economic and educational opportunities for all. Before joining Mahapach-Taghir, Sarit was public advocacy coordinator at the human rights organization Gisha (2013-2014), and during the last Israeli elections (2015) she was the Regional Field Director of Tel-Aviv for the non-partisan movement V15. While a PhD candidate at BC Sarit founded and led a graduate seminar on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Boston College which brought people from diverse persuasions to learn together the geography and history of the narratives that stoke the conflict. Since her return to Israel in 2013 Sarit co-founded and led a similar seminar for lecturers at the Kibbutzim College for Arts and Education focusing on the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on education in Israel. Since 2017 Sarit is a lecturer at Ono Academic College's humanities Masters program. In 2014 Sarit starred in the Israeli feature film “The Kindergarten Teacher” which, among other honors, was part of the Critic’s Week at Cannes Festival and a NYT critic’s pick. Lastly, she is a founding member of the International Guestbook Project for Peace.

Christopher Yates received his PhD from Boston College in 2011, with John Sallis serving as Director and Richard Kearney (BC) and Jason Wirth (Seattle University) as Readers. In 2011 he co-edited (with fellow Boston College student Nathan Eckstrand) Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre (Continuum). In 2013 he adapted the subject of his dissertation into a book entitled The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling, published by Bloomsbury. He served as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Grove City College in Pennsylvania for two years (2012-1014) before accepting a position as Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Art Theory with the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA.edu), the low-residency doctoral program in which he currently teaches. He has published twelve articles in peer-reviewed journals and six book-review essays, as well as editorials, fiction, and poetry. Yates has also lectured widely in Europe and offered courses at the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University. Currently he is working on a book project that explores the central role of longing, imagination, and self-deception in the operations of reason.

Joseph Westfall graduated from BC with a PhD in philosophy in 2006. Under the direction of Vanessa Rumble and readers David Rasmussen and Richard Kearney, Westfall’s dissertation is entitled The Kierkegaardian Author: Authorship in Kierkegaard's Literary and Dramatic Criticism. It has been published in 2007 by Walter de Gruyter publishing. Currently, he is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Houston Downtown (tenured). He has won a research award at the University of Houston, is author of Hannibal Lector and Philosophy (Open Court, 2016), and Authority and Authorship in Kierkegaard’s Writings (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2018). Additionally, he is editor of The Continental Philosophy of Film Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018), Foucault and Nietzsche (with Alan Rosenberg) (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Shannon Vallor is the first Baillie Gifford Chair in Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (2019). She got her PhD at BC Philosophy Department in 2001 with a dissertation under the direction of Richard Cobb-Stevens.

Her research investigates how human character is being transformed by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, new social media, surveillance, and biomedical technologies, and appears in journals such as Ethics and Information Technology, Philosophy & Technology, and Techne, as well as a 2016 book from Oxford University Press: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. She is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology and is working on a new book on the subject of artificial intelligence and ethics: The AI Mirror: Rebuilding Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking.

She has a special interest in the integration of ethics with industry and engineering/computer science education, and engages in outreach on this subject with a range of stakeholders inside and outside academia, including government, industry, law, media and public policy professionals and advocates. She is AI Ethicist and Visiting Researcher, Google and Google Cloud AI. Recent professional honors include the 2015 World Technology Award in Ethics.

Scott Campbell graduated from BC with a Ph.D. in 2000. His dissertation, The Facticity of Life and Language in the Early Work of Martin Heidegger, was directed by the late Dr. William J. Richardson, S.J., and readers were P. Christopher Smith and Richard Cobb-Stevens. It was later published by Fordham University Press in 2012. He is currently tenured as Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY. In addition to the above mentioned book, Campbell has translated Heidegger’s GA 58: Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie as Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Winter Semester 1919/1920 (Continuum, 2013). He is also coeditor with Paul Bruno of The Science, Politics, and Ontology of Life-Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2013). Additionally, he is the recipient of the NEH Enduring Questions Grant to design and teach a course on “What is the value of a liberal arts education?” with Dr. Marjorie Roth (Spring 2012). In 2008 he received a Fulbright Scholar’s Grant to teach American Philosophy at the University of Pannonia in Vesprém, Hungary, and in 2005 he received a Fulbright-Hays Grant to travel to Australia and participate in the Fulbright program’s seminar “Australia: New Country, Old History.” Finally, in 2012, Campbell was selected for inclusion in the Princeton Review’s book The Best 300 Professors.