As the academic year is reaching its end, the students are embarking on all sorts of new journeys. Seniors are graduating, job hunting, and pursuing higher education while the younger students are looking for internships and jobs around the country. But what we never seem to know after each academic year is, what is the faculty doing?

This year, the Philosophy Department wanted to offer its professors a chance to share their upcoming accomplishments and milestones with the rest of the department. Some are continuing their research endeavors, others are traveling with family. Let’s find out what the philosophy professors are partaking in this summer.

Michael Fuerstein
Chair of the Philosophy Department, Michael Fuerstein, is currently collaborating with several marketing professors from the INSEAD business school, located in Fontainebleau, France. They are working together on understanding how marketers can better serve well-being. Their work is part of a larger research group, called the Society for Progress, which brings together scholars to better understand how the business world can integrate profit and societal progress.

Danny Muñoz-Hutchinson
Danny Muñoz-Hutchinson, a Professor at St. Olaf, is planning to continue his recently adopted study of Sanskrit. This will mark his third semester of a three-semester course, after which he will begin a new project on “mental construction” in Plotinus and the Yogacārā school of Indian Buddhism. What this means is that Professor Muñoz-Hutchinson will be examining how Plotinus (Greek) and Vasubandhu and Asanga  (Indian) think our minds “construct” the world.

Dan Farnham
Scholar, Dan Farnham, will be embarking on travel this upcoming summer accompanied by his family. They are heading to the mountain west where Professor Farnham will be doing an extended solo hike and reviewing the literature on intrinsic goodness for a new upcoming project.

Arthur Cunningham
Arthur Cunningham, a Professor in the Philosophy Department, will be attending the national meeting of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers this coming July. At this meeting, Professor Cunningham is hoping to gather some new ideas to inform his teaching. He is expecting to hear about AI– both how teachers are incorporating it into classwork and strategies for promoting good old-fashioned AI-free thinking and writing.

Brian and Anna Söderquist
This summer, Brian Söderquist and Anna Söderquist will be advising the Junior Research Fellowship program at the Kierkegaard Summer Institute during the month of July. This will entail both professors leading class everyday, conducting reading groups, and overseeing independent research and student presentations with selected fellows from across the world. Each of the fellows, including two St. Olaf students, Miranda Gladstein and Juan Carlos De Pablo Romero Villareal, will be partaking in intensive philosophical research based on independently developed research questions advised by both Professors Brain and Anna Söderquist during the Junior Research Fellowship program.

Nicole Yokum
St. Olaf scholar, Nicole Yokum, will be participating in a four-day Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop on Hortense Spillers at the end of May. Throughout this workshop, Professor Yokum will be present both as a mediator and host of an arts workshop. Following this workshop, she will be leading three student researchers through a six-week CURI project on Abolition Feminism Aesthetics. This project is intended to jumpstart Professor Yokum’s work on a book project called Angela Davis and the Spirit of the Frankfurt School, which she will be continuing in her new bright orange office at home. Accompanying her academic pursuits, Professor Yokum will be doing a lot of trail running, swimming, reading, and biking this summer.

Jason Marsh
This June, Professor Jason Marsh will be traveling to Halifax to attend the Canadian Philosophical Association Annual Meeting. Following this academic journey, Professor Marsh will be taking a trip to Washington D.C. as a tourist before teaching a virtual course on biomedical ethics. For the remainder of the summer, Professor Marsh is planning to finish some of his current writing projects on reproductive ethics to complete his spring sabbatical project.

Brendon Westler
Brendon Westler, Professor in St. Olaf’s philosophy department, participated in a conference early this May on Liberalism and the Masses: Revisiting the Political Thought of José Ortega y Gasset at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The talk that Professor Westler gave focused on Ortega’s understandings of crisis and precarity and how they might be applied to contemporary understandings of liberalism. For his talk at the conference, Professor Westler took a lot from his conversations with his students in his seminar this semester, Modern Spanish Philosophy, who he considers to be thoughtful and serious in philosophy.

Each professor is taking on their own adventures this summer, just as the students do at the end of each academic year. The Philosophy Department is wishing the faculty the best of luck with their endeavors this summer!