Julianne Chung is presently an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Louisville. Her primary areas of research are epistemology, the philosophy of language, and aesthetics (with which she engages in a cross-cultural manner, specifically drawing from Anglo-analytic and classical to contemporary Chinese and Japanese philosophy). She is also associate editor of Oxford Studies in Epistemology and a member of the American Philosophical Association’s committee on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies.
Anthony Cross is lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Texas State University. His research focuses on the ethical dimensions of our engagement with artworks and other cultural objects, on aesthetic normativity, and on the ethics of partiality.
Keren Gorodeisky is an Associate Professor at Auburn University. Her work on Kant, aesthetic pleasure, aesthetic value, aesthetic rationality, and romantic aesthetics has appeared, among others, in the Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, British Journal of Aesthetics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and in various collections. Gorodeisky received the Philip Quinn Fellowship from the National Humanities Center for developing the book she is completing these days—a book on the significance of the logical form and sui generis type of rationality that characterize Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment. Her next book project is on the relationship between aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic value, arguing for a neglected alternative between aesthetic hedonism and its non-affective denial. Gorodeisky serves as the vice-president of the Society for German Idealism and Romanticism.
Sarah Hegenbart is currently a lecturer in art history in Munich, where she works on her post-doctoral research project (habilitation) that investigates into the potential of images to foster criticality in the era of post-truth politics. In her doctorate at the Courtauld in London, Sarah explored Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village in Burkina Faso as a testing ground for a critical interrogation of Richard Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk. This involved an interrogation of non-Western approaches to beauty and the philosophical concept of ‘ubuntu’. Prior to this, Sarah completed an M.St. in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Magister in Philosophy and History of Art at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Alex King is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo. She works in ethics, metaethics, and aesthetics. Her main interests are in the ‘ought implies can’ principle and aesthetic and moral normativity. She also runs the aesthetics and philosophy of art blog Aesthetics for Birds.
Dominic McIver Lopes FRSC teaches philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He has worked on images and their values, technology in art, and theories of art. His most recent book is Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value, and he’s now thinking about cosmopolitan aesthetics.
Samantha Matherne is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her primary research interests lie in exploring the relationship between perception and aesthetics in Kant and post-Kantian traditions, including German Idealism, Neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology.
Thi Nguyen is Assistant Professor at Utah Valley University. His primary interests are aesthetics and social epistemology. His currents interests include the role of trust in aesthetics, the aesthetics of activities, and epistemic and emotional lives of groups. He is assistant editor at Aesthetics for Birds. His book, Games: Agency as Art, is forthcoming.
Nick Riggle is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego. His publications focus on areas where the line between art and life is blurred: personal style, ideals, beauty’s transformative import, social art, street art and graffiti, social norms and ‘openings’, self-presentation, creativity in politics, among other things. His recent book is a popular/accessible take on these themes entitled On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck. He is currently writing papers on aesthetic necessity, valuing appearances, and individuality and self-presentation.
Elizabeth Scarbrough is a lecturer in philosophy at Florida International University. She works on issues at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics.
James Shelley is professor of philosophy at Auburn University. His work applies the history of aesthetics, particularly that of the eighteenth century, to questions about the nature of aesthetic value, the aesthetic status of artworks, and the value of tragedy.
Brian Soucek is a Professor of Law at UC Davis. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University, spent three years in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, got his JD at Yale Law School, and clerked for two federal judges before joining the faculty at Davis, where he writes about anti-discrimination law, refugee/asylum law, and intersections between aesthetics and the law.
Servaas van der Berg is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He is writing his dissertation on the psychological underpinnings of appreciative engagement. Before moving to Vancouver he completed a master’s in his hometown of Stellenbosch, South Africa, where he worked on depiction and the expressive properties of artefacts.
Jonathan M. Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona. He did his graduate work in the late 1990s at Rutgers University, studying the philosophy of cognitive science, epistemology, and aesthetics; there he was fortunate enough to be a student of Peter Kivy, and moreover to form a collaboration with Aaron Meskin, with whom he has published numerous papers on the nature of our imaginative engagements with fictions. His project for the seminar draws on his epistemological interest in naturalistic debunking arguments, and what implications a deeper understanding of the psychological basis of our aesthetic reactions might have our experiences and evaluations of beauty.