We made it to the summer! I hope that you are able to enjoy a somewhat slower pace in the coming months, with time to reflect and revel in the lengthy days of summer. If you’re looking for reading recommendations, check out our faculty summer reading list.
This has been a challenging year on campus, with grant terminations, international student visa revocations, significant budget cuts and more. Academic institutions across the country are under fire, and trying to figure out how to maintain educational excellence and our research mission in the face of significant disruption at the federal level. That issue is particularly acute at UW, given that we regularly top the list of public academic institutions in terms of federal grant dollars secured. Our philosophy department faculty members are part of that community, with awards from the NSF and the NIH, as well as private foundations.
Given the various stressors, I am very appreciative of the amazing group of people we have in UW’s Department of Philosophy, including all of our faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and staff. Working with a stellar group of talented and committed people makes all the difference.
Read on to hear more about some of the department’s news and achievements this year. A few highlights I’d like to call your attention to:
Department news
We are deeply grateful for a generous gift from longtime UW Friend of Philosophy Dan Gerler, who passed away in 2024. Dan’s belief in the value of philosophy was steady, and he supported many activities in our department. We are delighted to announce this year’s Gerler faculty fellow – Sosseh Assaturian – who will be running a workshop on her book manuscript, Stoic Assertibles. Dan’s gift will also provide funding for graduate dissertation fellowships in AY 2025-26 and beyond.
Undergraduate highlight
Our fantastic undergraduate student André Ye (double major in computer science and philosophy) won a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship to pursue a PhD in Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). André was also recognized as the 2025 Dean’s Medalist for the Social Sciences division of the UW College of Arts & Sciences.
Graduate student highlights
Erica Bigelow was recently announced as the winner of a UW Presidential Dissertation Fellowship for 2025-26, for work on her dissertation on affective injustice, under the supervision of faculty member Carina Fourie.
Kai Milanovich won the 2025 Nancy Hartsock Graduate Student Award. This UW award recognizes the creative achievements of an emerging scholar doing work in the area of feminist theory. The award was given for their paper “Distinguishing Situated Knowledge and Standpoint Theory: Defending the Achievement Thesis” which is forthcoming in Hypatia.
Faculty highlights
In November 2024, Carole Lee won the Philosophy of Science Association’s Prize in Philosophy of Science & Race for her collaborative contribution to "NIH Peer Review: Criterion Scores Completely Account for Racial Disparities in Overall Impact Scores" published in Science Advances and co-authored with Elena Erosheva, Sheridan Grant, Mei-Ching Chen, Mark D. Lindner, and Richard K. Nakamura.
We hired a new faculty member, Joshua Eisenthal, who comes to us from a faculty position at Cal Tech University and will start at UW in fall 2025. Josh received a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2018. He combines research interests and expertise in the history and philosophy of science with expertise in early analytic philosophy. At Cal Tech, he has been part of the Einstein Papers project.
Colin Marshall was promoted to Full Professor and Rose Novick was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Three cheers for this important recognition of our colleagues!
Finally, check out some of our faculty who are taking their work public:
Michael Blake (updated February 2025) “Must the president be a moral leader?” in The Conversation
Michael Blake (July 2024) “Electing a virtuous president would make immunity irrelevant” in The Conversation
Paul Franco (November 2024) “Susan Stebbing on Logical Positivism and Communication” for the Ergo Blog
Colin Marshall (April 2025) “Empathy can take a toll” in The Conversation