Philosophy of the Americas

Faculty expertise includes African-American philosophy, classical and contemporary pragmatism, naturalism, philosophy of liberation,  and transcendentalism, with figure specializations in Dewey, Emerson, James, Peirce, Rorty, and Santayana.

Those who work in these areas use these traditions and figures to pursue questions integral to other research areas like art and culture, ethics, politics, law, philosophical psychology, and gender, race, and difference, and often in dialogue with other traditions, particularly continental philosophy. This has led to sustained reflections on issues of philosophical orientation, philosophical method and presentation, and theory’s relation to practice.

Those working in this area regard American philosophical traditions as touchstones for ongoing, innovative philosophical work.

Selected Publications

John Lysaker, After Emerson. Indiana University Press, 2017.
 
John Lysaker, Emerson & Self-Culture. Indiana University Press, 2008.

Noelle McAfee. “Dewey and Public Philosophy,” in the Oxford Handbook on Dewey, Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2017.
 
John J. Stuhr, Pragmatic Fashions:  Pluralism, Democracy, Relativism, and the Absurd.
Indiana University Press, 2016.
 
John J. Stuhr, “Pragmatism About Nationalism,” Dewey Studies, 2018.

John J. Stuhr, “Dewey’s Pragmatic Politics:  Power, Limits, and Realism about Democracy as a Way of Life,” Oxford Handbook of Dewey, ed. Steven Fesmire (Oxford and New York:  Oxford University Press, 2019 hardback, 2018 e-book). 
 
Jessica T. Wahman. “Materialism in Limbo: Democritus, Santayana, and the Ethics of Metaphysics,” Cognitio, Vol 18.1, 2017.

Jessica T. Wahman. “‘Fleshing Out Consensus’: Radical Pragmatism, Civil Rights, and the Algebra Project.” Education and Culture: The Journal of the John Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture, Vol. 25.1, 2009. 

George Yancy, Ed. Reframing the Practice of Philosophy: Bodies of Color, Bodies of Knowledge. SUUNY Press, 2012.
 
George Yancy, Ed. African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations. Routledge, 1998

Rocío Zambrana, “‘Dystopia and Countermemory in Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso and Saidiya Hartman,” Contestations: Philosophical, Historical, Aesthetic, ed. Adam Burgos and P. Khalil Saucier (forthcoming). 

Rocío Zambrana, “The Plantation Complex in the Colony of Puerto Rico: On Material Conditions,” Matters, special issue of Síntesis, ed. Thomas Clément Mercier (forthcoming).

Rocío Zambrana, Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).

Recent Courses