Art and Culture
Faculty research explores various art domains such as comedy, hip hop, lyric poetry, the novel, painting, sculpture, and theater with many approaches operating in non-exclusive ways, such as affect theory, critical theory, deconstruction, feminism, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and relational aesthetics.
Projects often attend to specific works and/or explore how they operate in diverse social contexts and movements, and most draw upon other disciplines like art history, comparative literature, film studies, music, and poetics.
Recent projects concern the political power of comedy, the philosophical aspects and implications of Wagner’s music, the nature of improvisation, James Joyce’s philosophical roots, Brian Eno’s ambient music, questions of taste, and the nature of aesthetic experience and artistic meaning.
Selected Publications
John Lysaker. Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports. (Oxford, 2018)
John Lysaker. “In the Interest of Art,” Phenomenology and the Arts, Peter Costello and Licia Carlson, Editors. Lexington Books. 2016 pp. 47-58.
John Lysaker. “Finding Our Bearings with Art,” NONsite.org, Issue #16.
Andrew J. Mitchell. Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling. Stanford University Press, 2010
Andrew J. Mitchell. Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts. SUNY Press, 2013. Co-edited with Samuel Slote.
John J. Stuhr, “Philosophy, Literature, and Dogma." Overheard in Seville. 31, 2013. 19-30
Jessica T. Wahman, "Drama as Physical Genre," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 28.4: 2014. 454-471.
Cynthia Willett. Uproarious: How Feminist Comics and Other Subversives Speak Truth, University of Minnesota Press, 2019, with Julie Willett.
George Yancy, Ed. Therapeutic Uses of Rap and Hip-Hop. Routledge, 2012 – with Susan Hadley.
Recent Courses
540 Heidegger and 20th Century Poetry (Mitchell)
551 Aesthetics and Politics (Willett)
551: Tragedy and the Blues (Willett)
551: The Politics of Music and Emotions (Willett)
572 Hegel and 20th Century Aesthetics (Lysaker)
789 Heidegger, Adorno, Dewey (Lysaker)
789 Wagner & Philosophy: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Adorno (Mitchell)
789 James Joyce and Philosophy