Associate Professor of Philosophy & Department Chair.   My teaching, research and personal interests mesh together in a rather seamless fashion.  Currently I teach three courses that reflect my areas of specialty and my intellectual curiosity:  Philosophy of Women’s Lives, Knowledge and Social Change, and Knowing Bodies.  Each of these courses seeks to understand the connection between theory and practice, philosophy and lived experience, and epistemology and politics.  The position I take in all my teaching is that philosophy without action is rather purposeless.  What makes the study of philosophy so important is the way that it can translate into action and change in the everyday world.  My hope is that my courses inspire students to critically assess those things they may have taken for granted and to feel empowered to act upon those things they wish to improve or change.

Because of my commitment to the connection between philosophy and everyday life, I try to be active in my community.  I am on the board and the governance committee of a women’s shelter called Project Woman. I also am on the board and an organizer of a girls’ group called Grrlz to Womyn.  

Summer of 2004 I went to Viet Nam with my colleague Molly Wood (a feminist historian) to participate in a seminar entitled “Transition and Transformation in Viet Nam.”   We were in Ha Noi and Saigon, for 17 days. It had a profound effect upon both of us. It led me to my current project that I am tentatively calling “The War on Reproduction.” While in Viet Nam I visited a peace village attached to Saigon’s Women’s Hospital.  In this peace village were children--infants through teens--that were suffering the genetic effects of Agent Orange that was sprayed thirty years ago during the Viet Nam war.     The experience I had in the peace village coincided with interests I already had in the way pesticides, herbicides, and pharmaceuticals reconstructed the very materiality of our bodies and disproportionately affected women’s lives.  This experience and prior interest have initiated the very beginning stages of “The War on Reproduction,” which I hope to spend my 2006-2007 sabbatical year researching.

My recent publications include “It’s In the Meat: Science Studies, Science Fiction and Ruth Ozeki’s Demystification of Scientific Knowledge,” in Science Studies and Science Fiction, M. Grebowicz, ed, forthcoming, and “Telling Her Own Truth:  June Jordan, Standard English and the Epistemology of Ignorance,” in Still Seeking an Attitude, Kinloch, V. and M. Grebowicz, eds.  2004.  Both of these projects came out of a National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Seminar on Feminist Epistemology, hosted by Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan, 2003. I am writing a feminist philosophy reference book, Feminist Philosophies A-Z for Edinburgh University Press that should be out fall of 2006.

I am also on the steering committee of a new feminist philosophy group, FEMMSS (Feminist Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Science Studies).  Our fearless organizer is Cate Hundleby, Windsor University.  She and Lynn Nelson hosted our first bi-annual conference at University of Washington, Seattle, fall of 2004.

My Ph.D. is from Temple University, where I was also a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy for two years and the Associate Director of the Awareness of Teaching and Teaching Improvement Center.  My M.A. is from Cleveland State and my B.A. is from Lake Erie College.  I came to Wittenberg in 2000.