I’m grateful to share the good news that I have received a New Faculty Start Up Grant from the ASPiRE Program at Ball State University. Specifically, this $3,000 grant will enable me to travel to a couple of additional conferences in the coming year and buy some books to help me advance my research on collective moral responsibility.

The experience of writing my grant proposal was really valuable, in that it helped me reflect on my current research and do some long-term planning. Even more importantly, the success of the proposal means I’ll get additional institutional support as I move forward with my work. So thank you very much, Sponsored Projects Administration and ASPiRE Program, for helping me prepare my grant and for accepting my proposal!

At the end of this month, I will be presenting and seeing new research at the Hypatia conference at Villanova University in Philadelphia. If you look at the website for the conference, “Exploring Collaborative Contestations and Diversifying Philosophy,” you’ll see that there is a lot to look forward to! In the meantime, I’ll be working hard on my paper (about the concept of a daughter).

Tomorrow I’m going to be sharing some of my work at WOGAP, the workshop on gender and philosophy that is hosted at MIT. The topic of my paper, moral responsibility and its relation to one’s conceptual repertoire, is one that I have found very interesting and challenging over the past year and change, so I’m eagerly looking forward to the discussion.

I am also grateful for the opportunity to share my work with folks whose company and insights I have so enjoyed during all the other WOGAP sessions I’ve attended these past two years, and for the chance to thank them for the good times in person before I move away this summer.

I am simply thrilled to say that this coming fall, I’ll be joining the faculty at Ball State University as Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies! While those who need to know have known about this for a while, there is an extra dose of niceness in sharing the good news publicly.

Though I’ll miss some wonderful people in New Hampshire when I’m gone and I won’t get to continue participating in some important ongoing projects here, moving to Ball State is going to open up lots more opportunities for me to meet my long-term goals (professionally and otherwise), so I am really looking forward to what lies ahead.

Many of my fellow nerds (ahem, professors) have probably already seen or heard about this, but I just have to post a link to this amazing, interactive chart that is chockablock with data about how students writing online evaluations use different words to describe professors of different genders/sexes and in different disciplines.

I linked to one of the iterations of the chart that makes me feel good, but if you search for different words, you can find other patterns that may make you feel good and patterns that may make you want to cry and/or scream. Some of them are unsurprising, but some of them honestly blew my mind. For instance, why would students regularly use ‘the’ more times per million words when evaluating male professors and ‘when’ more times when evaluating female professors?

Lots of food for thought here, so bon appetit!

The latest issue of the journal Environmental Ethics contains an article by yours truly, which is called “Courage as an Environmental Virtue.” Here is a brief abstract:

In this paper, I argue for the claim that we should give courage a more significant place in our understanding of how familiar virtues can and should be reshaped to capture what it is to be virtuous relative to the environment. After discussing the virtues that tend to be emphasized by environmental virtue ethicists and some ways that courage is different from them, I build on Matthew Pianalto’s account of moral courage to explain what a specifically environmental moral courage would look like. Then I discuss three benefits that we can expect to gain by recognizing courage as an environmental virtue: (1) it helps us recognize the high stakes nature of much environmental activism, (2) it can make environmental activism (or tolerance of it) appealing to a broader audience, and (3) it aides in the de-militarization of the concept of courage.

Classes start on Monday, so I am getting my ducks in a row for the new school year, but I am also looking forward to the public presentation that I am giving as the first event of Colby-Sawyer’s Fall Faculty Colloquium Series on Thursday, September 25th at 4:00 p.m. in Wheeler Hall.

During the presentation, I’m going to talk about a paper that I presented at philosophy conferences in Washington, DC and Lisbon, Portugal earlier this year. Since the paper is rather long and technical for a general audience, during the presentation, I will just focus on one argument for the claim that jealousy can help people protect the personal relationships that they value, and thus protect the basis of their self-respect.