Professor of Philosophy

Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology

Affiliated Professor of Women's Studies

University of South Florida

Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy, Queen's University

 

PERSONAL: 

Born November 27, 1969 in Los Angeles, CA. Canadian Permanent Resident since 1971.

EDUCATION:

Sommelier Certification, School of Hospitality and Tourism, Algonquin College, 2007

Greenwall Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics and Health Policy, Johns Hopkins University, 2003-2005

Ph.D., Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, 1996.

Dissertation: Creativity, Conformity, and the Social Constitution of the Subject. Director: John Haugeland. Committee: David Gauthier, Iris Young, Jennifer Whiting, MichaelThompson

Honours B.A. (With High Distinction), Philosophy, University of Toronto, 1990

AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION:

Bioethics and philosophical and cultural studies of medicine, epistemology, eighteenth century philosophy, feminist philosophy.

AREAS OF COMPETENCE:

Philosophy of science, twentieth century European philosophy, philosophy of mind and language, aesthetics, logic.

MAJOR GRANTS AND OTHER RESEARCH FUNDING:

2006-9 SSHRC Standard Research Grant, “Autonomy and the Negotiation of Information in Reproductive Health Care”, $100,565. 

1997 National Endowment for the Humanities summer research institute on Background Practices, UC-Santa Cruz. 

1993 National Endowment for the Humanities, summer research institute on Embodiment, UC-Santa Cruz 

1991 Mellon Fellowship for Summer Language Study (French, La Pocatière, Quebec)

MAJOR PROFESSIONAL HONOURS AND AWARDS:

2006-7 Marston LaFrance Research Fellow, Carleton University. 

2003-5 Greenwall Fellowship in Bioethics and Health Policy, Johns Hopkins University. 

2000-1 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Award for Teaching Excellence, Carleton University. 

1990-2 (honorary fellow for 1994-5) National Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities.


PUBLICATIONS:

Books:

With Mark Lance, ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topology of the Space of Reasons (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2008).

Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture and Mothers’ Bodies.  (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2005).

Reviews: JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, Choice Magazine (“highly recommended”), Hastings Center Report, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.  

Awards: 2007 Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize, Honourable Mention

(Editor) Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006).

Reviews: Journal of the History of Philosophy, Notre Dame Philosophical     Reviews


Edited Journal Issue:

Special Issue on Maternal Bodies, Hypatia 21:1, Winter 2006.


Articles, Book Chapters, and Encyclopedia Entries:

M. Lance and R. Kukla, “Perception, Language, and the First Person”, forthcoming in Reading Brandom, ed. B. Weiss and J. Wanderer, Routledge 2008.

R. Kukla, M. Kuppermann, M. Little, A. D. Lyerly, L. M. Mitchell, E. M. Armstrong, and L. H. Harris (The Obstetrics and Gynecology Risk Research Group), “Finding Autonomy in Birth,” forthcoming in Bioethics, 2008.

“The Critical Role of Philosophy in Bioethics”, forthcoming in the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine, Fall 2008.

“The Phrenological Impulse and the Morphology of Character”, forthcoming in Agency and Embodiment, ed. Susan Sherwin, Susan Campbell, and Letitia Meynell, Pennsylvania State University Press 2008.

D. Weiss and R. Kukla, “The ‘Natural Look’: Extreme Makeovers and the Limits of Human Self-Fashioning”, forthcoming in Feminist Perspectives on Cosmetic Surgery, ed. Cressida Heyes and Meredith Jones, 2008.

“Pregnancy: Ethical Issues”, commissioned for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (in progress).

“Naturalizing Objectivity: Critical Review of Daston and Galison, Objectivity, and Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway”, commissioned for Perspectives on Science (in progress).

“Resituating the Principle of Equipoise: Justice and Access to Care in Non-Ideal Conditions”, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 17:3, 2007, 171-202.

“Holding the Body of Another”, in Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 11:2, 2007, 397-408.

“How do Patients Know?”, Hastings Center Report 37:5, 2007, 27-35.

A. D. Lyerly, L. M. Mitchell, E. M. Armstrong, L. H. Harris, R. Kukla, M. Kuppermann, and M. Little (The Obstetrics and Gynecology Risk Research Group), “Risk, Values, and Decision Making Surrounding Pregnancy”, Obstetrics and Gynecology 109:4, 2007, 979-984.

“Familiar Thinking: Reflections of a Mother, Philosopher, Philosopher’s Wife, and Philosopher’s Daughter”, American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Feminism, Fall 2007, 7-9.

“Objectivity and Perspective in Empirical Knowledge”, Episteme: A Journal of Social Philosophy 3:1, 2006, 80-95.

“Ethics and Ideology in Breastfeeding Advocacy Campaigns”, Hypatia 21:1, 2006, 157-80. 

“Introduction: Special Issue on Maternal Bodies”, Hypatia 21:1, 2006, vii-ix

“Placing the Aesthetic in Kant’s Critical Epistemology”, in Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, ed. R. Kukla, Cambridge, 2006, 1-31.

“Pregnant Bodies as Public Spaces”, in The Spaces of Motherhood, ed. S. Hardy and C. Wiedmer, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, 283-305. 

 “Conscientious Autonomy: Displacing Decisions in Health Care”, Hastings Center Report 35:2, 2005, 34-44.  

Letters and replies in Hastings Center Report 35:5, 2005.

“The Limits of Lines: Negotiating Hard Medical Choices”, American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine 5:1, 2005, 15-19.

“The Antinomies of Impure Reason: Rousseau and Kant on the Metaphysics of Truth-Telling”, Inquiry 48:3, 2005, 203-31.

“Testing WIC: Ethical and Methodological Limits and Possibilities”, report prepared for the Economic Research Services office of the USDA, 2004. 

“Attention and Blindness: Objectivity and Contingency in Moral Perception”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy sup. 28 (Feminist Moral Philosophy, ed. S. Brennan), 2003, 319-46.

With Laura Ruetsche, “Contingent Natures and Virtuous Knowers: Could Epistemology be ‘Gendered’?”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32:3,  2002, 389-418.

“The Ontology and Temporality of Conscience”, Continental Philosophy Review 35, 2002, 1-34.

“Talking Back: Monstrosity, Mundanity and Cynicism in Television Talk Shows”, Rethinking Marxism 14:1, 2002, 67-96.

“Myth, Memory and Misrecognition in Sellars’ ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’”, Philosophical Studies 101, 2000, 161-211.

“How to Get an Interpretivist Committed”, Protosociology 14, 2000, 77-117.

With Sarah Hardy, “A Paramount Narrative: Exploring Space on the Starship Enterprise”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57:2, 1999, 177-91.

“Performing Nature in the Letter to M. d'Alembert”, in Rousseau on Arts and Politics: Autour de la Lettre d'Alembert, ed. M. Butler, Ottawa: Pensées Libres, 1998, 67-77.

 “Reading Literature After Hegel”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 12:4, 1998, 243-54.

“Making and Masking Human Nature: Rousseau's Aesthetics of Education”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 29:3, 1998, 228-51.

 “Decentering Women”, Metaphilosophy 27:1-2, 1996, 28-52.

 “The Coupling of Human Souls: Rousseau and the Problem of Gender Relations”, in The Nature of Political Dialogue, ed. S. Esquith, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of Science and the Humanities vol. 46, 1996, 57-91. 

REPRINTED in Feminist Rereadings of Rousseau, ed. L. Lange, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.

 “Causation as a Natural and as a Philosophical Relation”, Eidos 10, December 1992, 161-78.

 “Cognitive Models and Representation”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43, June 1992, 219-32.

With André Kukla, “Meaning Holism and Intentional Psychology”, Analysis 49, 1989, 173-5.

Book Reviews:

Review of Joan Rothschild’s Dream of the Perfect Child, Hypatia, 22:3, 2007, 199-203.

Review of Slavoj Zizek’s Interrogating the Real, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews,www.ndpr.nd.edu, April 2006.

Review of Joseph Rouse’s How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism, Philosophy of Science, 71:2, 2004, 216-219.

Review of Elizabeth Rose Wingrove’s Rousseau’s Republican Romance, Hypatia 17:2, 2002, 174-183.

Review of Michael Davis’ The Autobiography of Philosophy: Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Philosophy in Review, 29:6, 2001, 398-401. 

 

RESEARCH TEAMS:

Obstetrics and Gynecology Risk Research Group. This is a group of scholars dedicated to producing co-authored work on cultural and medical representation of risk during pregnancy. The other members are: Annie Lyerly, M.D. (Obstetrics and Gynecology, Duke Medical Center),Margaret O. Little, Ph.D. (Philosophy, Georgetown University), Miriam Kupperman, Ph.D.(Obstetrics and Gynecology and Epidemiology, UCSF), Lisa H. Harris, M.D., Ph.D. (Obstetrics and Gynecology and American Studies, University of Michigan), Elizabeth M. Armstrong,Ph.D., M.P.H. (Sociology and Population Health, Princeton University) and Lisa M. Mitchell,Ph.D. (Anthropology, University of Victoria).

“The Culture of Intensive Parenting” Research Initiative. Working to set up a trans-Atlantic, multi-site research center with Ellie Lee and Frank Furedi at the University of Kent.

“What Kind of People Should There Be?” Research Initiative. This is a project on the history, culture, and ethics of enhancement and eugenics, let by Robert Wilson of the University ofAlberta, and including roughly 20 co-applicants and collaborators from five countries.

 

PRESENTATIONS AND MEDIA APPEARANCES:

I have been an invited speaker at approximately 40 different universities.  I have given approximately 15 keynote or invited lectures at conferences, and 50 refereed conference papers and comments.  I have been a recurring guest on CBC Radio and made appearances on other radio and television stations. 

 

PAST ACADEMIC POSITIONS, INCLUDING INVITED VISITING POSITIONS:

2000-08 Associate Professor (with tenure), Department of Philosophy, Carleton University

    (cross-appointed in Political Science 2000-2006)

2005-07 Affiliated Associate Professor, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University.

2003-04 Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Department of Population and Family Health Studies, Johns Hopkins University 

2002-05 Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University

2002 Visiting Scholar, Department of Philosophy, University of Victoria 

1998-00 Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Carleton University (crossappointed in Political Science 1999-2000) 

1997-98 Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico 

1995-97 Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon 

1993-95 Instructor, Department of Philosophy, Middlebury College 

1991-93 Teaching Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh

1988-90 Teaching Assistant, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto

 

PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS IN BIOETHICS/APPLIED ETHICS:

Institutional Review Board Member, USF-Health (2008-)

Executive Board Member, Carleton University Centre on Ethics and Values (2005-2007)

Member, Research Ethics Board, Carleton University (2005-2007)

Instructor, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Summer Intensive Bioethics Course (2004, 2005)

Visiting Scholar and Research Ethics Consultant, USDA Economic Research Services Office,Food and Nutrition Assistance Research Program (2004)


AFFILIATIONS AND MEMBERSHIPS:

Florida Philosophical Association; International Society for Phenomenological Studies; American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities; Feminist Approaches to Bioethics Network; American Philosophical Association; Canadian Philosophical Association; Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy.