Jason Bridges is Associate Professor of Philosophy. His primary research and teaching areas are the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. He also has interests in metaphysics and epistemology, the philosophy of action, the later work of Wittgenstein, and political philosophy. His main current projects are about reasons and rationality, and epistemic and semantic contextualism. He has also written on logical and structural difficulties in the "naturalization" of content, the relationship between content externalism and the rationality-involving character of psychological explanation, and issues concerning the attribution of mental states to animals.
Heather Keenleyside is Associate Professor in English and the College. Her teaching and research interests center on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, and include the history and theory of the novel, seventeenth and eighteenth-century British philosophy, early children's literature, as well as broader issues of literary form and genre. She also works on the history of philosophical thinking about the animal, and am particularly interested in the intersection between literary representation and animal studies. She is currently working on a book titled "Animals and Other People: Forms of Life in Eighteenth-Century Literature," which examines how a range of eighteenth-century writers link issues of literary form to ontological and political questions about animal life.
Chris Kennedy is William H. Colvin Professor and Chair, Department of Linguistics and Humanities Collegiate Division. His research is geared towards discovering and describing the principles that are involved in relating linguistic forms to meanings; determining how this mapping is achieved through the interaction of properties of the linguistic system, properties of cognition more generally, and broader features of communicative contexts; and understanding the extent to which structural and typological features of language can be explained in terms of meaning. Over the past two decades, he has explored these issues primarily through a focused exploration of the language of comparison, amount and degree, though his research has also touched on core issues in the syntax-semantics interface such as ellipsis, anaphora, and quantification.
College Summer Institute Leadership:
Faculty Director, Christopher J. Wild is Professor of Germanic Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and Collegiate Master of the Humanities in the College; he is also Associated Faculty in the Divinity School and Deputy Dean of the Humanities Division. Professor Wild is the author of Theater der Keuschheit - Keuschheit des Theaters. Zu einer Geschichte der (Anti-)Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist (Rombach: Freiburg, 2003), which traces the profound historical transformation of theatricality that takes place in German theater from the Baroque to Classicism. His current projects examine the ways in which theology and religion inform developments that are generally considered genuinely modern. Most immediately, he is working on a book that asks the seemingly simple question why Descartes’ founding text of modern philosophy was titled Meditations on First Philosophy in order to take its generic affiliation seriously.
Program Director, Nichole J. Fazio, is Associate Dean and Executive Director of the College Center for Research and Fellowships (CCRF). She holds a doctorate in the History of Art from the University of Oxford, with a specialization in 19th-century photography in Britain. Her current research considers Julia Margaret Cameron's visual treatment of the poetic sublime, particularly in her photographic illustrations of Tennyson's Arthurian poem, Idylls of the King, and her significance as an early British Symbolist. This work also considers Cameron's significance as one of the first art photographers to attempt to represent the unseen - among the great challenges in art - using the most mechanistic and literal medium of her time. These interests feature in a manuscript due to be published in 2023 celebrating the Cameron collections at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.