An introduction to women thinkers who reshaped philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries. The course highlights overlooked voices in metaphysics, ethics, and political thought, offering students a broader and more inclusive understanding of the philosophical canon. The course involves early figures amongst the first to sustain themselves as a woman writer in the period (La Roche); central women writers of Romanticism (Günderrode and B. von Arnim), particularly noting their engagement with philosophical issues associated with the post-Kantian tradition; the late-19th-century thinker Lou Andreas-Salomé; and, finally, 20th -century women philosophers (Arendt and Wolf).

Focusing on dialogues between Black intellectuals and the German philosophical tradition, this course engages works by Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, and Audre Lorde alongside Kant, Hegel, Clara Zetkin, and others. Students analyze how questions of freedom, race, and justice travel across historical, cultural, and national contexts.

Through close study of Virginia Woolf’s fiction, diaries, and letters, this course examines the intersections of gender, aesthetic form, and modernist innovation. Students explore how Woolf’s work engages with key questions in literary theory, from subjectivity to narrative experimentation. Attention will also be given to the philosophical dimensions of Woolf’s writings, particularly her engagement with questions of identity, consciousness, and the nature of aesthetic experience.

This course aims to deconstruct popular symbols (used to discuss metaphysical issues) in literature and philosophy. It investigates figures of the undead and spectral across literature and philosophy, from zombies to ghosts. Drawing on Asian American and Black literary traditions, alongside philosophical thought experiments, students consider how these symbols challenge the boundaries between life and death, self and other, and presence and absence. Special emphasis is placed on how these symbolic figures illuminate enduring philosophical questions in metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of mind.