Nova PhDs

A forum for grads of Villanova's Philosophy PhD program

New (october) JFP is out
looks pretty decent. villanova has the one ad for a senior continentalist — now listed as a full OR associate professor.

strong AOS continental jobs (including all the specific ads for hegel, 19th-20th century french or german, etc.) at binghamton, colby, cornell, fordham, university of maine, georgia state, oglethorpe, memphis, university of central florida, grand valley state, notre dame, northwestern, and washington state. please feel free to note any i've left out. there are also a few other positions like duquesne (ancient) that list continental as their top AOC.

so who do we have on the market this year? ammon, greg, adam, seth? tim? anybody know darin and steve finn's status? any other abd's we have that would be going out (matt groe or josh maybe)? let us know if there's any way we can help!

if anyone has any information that might be helpful for our folks, please post it below.


EDITED to add:
not a lot of activity for continental hires in the last month, but new postings online include lebanon valley (?), harvard (kant+19th), and montreal.

next jfp (168) should be out in a day or two — publication date is listed as november 10th.

ammon, did you see the new positions in aesthetics (e.g. an AOS at lafayette college)?
Posted by John Whitmire on Thursday October 13, 2005 at 11:11am
John Whitmire:
i'm fairly certain there will be a strong internal candidate for the oglethorpe position, but it probably would not be kosher for me to post more details than that here.

oh, and for those who don't know, tom busch's friend shaun gallagher is chair at UCF.
10.13.2005 12:01pm
J.C. Berendzen:
Speaking of placement, the department at Nova has updated the website, bringing the placement info out in the open, and bringing it up to date.
10.13.2005 12:13pm
Ammon Allred:
I really didn't think that year looked that good. Of course, I am a little pessimistic. Granted, there are some exceptional continental jobs, but somelike Northwestern, Cornell (maybe, depending on how you construe post-Kantian German) and Memphis seem to have hitches. (Northwestern's is open rank and therefore could theoretically be super-competitive depending on what their actual hiring criteria are; Cornell's may or may not be continental the way we all understand it, and Memphis' seems a little loopy for two reasons: one, it's almost the exact same as the ad they ran last year --- that doesn't mean anything in itself, as Farhang's hire last year bears out --- and two, they claim to be interviewing at SPEP --- given that the JFP just came out and the posting wasn't online or in the Chronicle, that strikes me as odd unless they have some potential candidates already.) That said, I'll still be applying for all of them. The other jobs you mentioned really do look good, though, particularly (from my perspective) the ones at Fordham and Maine. On the subject of Memphis, do you think it would be worthwhile to email them my application today or tomorrow, with some sort of note saying that I'll mail my materials also, but wanted to let them get the chance to give them my materials prior to SPEP?
Aesthetics is crappy this year, of course, but no worse than it is any other year so I guess that's a mixed blessing.
Still haven't decided what sort of search I'm doing this year; probably something shy of a full search.

Yes, Villanova has opened the position up to any tenured level. There was some discussion of making it open rank (allowing assistant professors to apply) but that was nixed (I think rightly, since at least part of the goal of this hire, in addition to teaching needs is to attract graduate students and to help maintain Villanova's strong Continental profile on the market). I can't imagine that opening the search up to associate professors won't produce plenty of quality up-and-comers.

Who all is planning on going to SPEP? I look forward to keeping it real with you all in the Heimat.
10.13.2005 12:41pm
J.C. Berendzen:
Given Ammon's comments regarding why Villanova's job is not open rank, it is interesting to consider why Northwestern's add is...

Consider the situation at Northwestern: they recently had something of a brain-drain, losing the solidly analytic Thomas Ricketts and Charles Travis, the solidly continental Robert Gooding-Williams (he is up for a spot on the SPEP exec. committee this year), and Terry Pinkard. In the recent JFP, they advertise 4 cooresponding jobs. Two of them have an AOS that makes them an obvious replacement: continental for Gooding-Williams and Kant/Hegel for Pinkard. There is also an AOS in metaphysics and epistemology/language/mind, so it is "core analytic". But the fourth is in ethics. All are open rank.

So the interesting things here are that there is possibly a slight move away from at least theoretical analytic phil. Also interesting is that all four are open rank. Perhaps they aim at 2 or 3 senior and 1 or 2 junior hires and want to keep all their options open. Who knows?

This speculation leads me to an intriguing (possibly...) idea: if we could collect the requisite info on each hiring department and each grad program putting people on the market, we could devise some kind of philosophy-job-market fantasy league... or maybe not...

Oh, and I agree with Ammon that the JFP doesn't really look that great overall, but there are some choice jobs.
10.13.2005 5:38pm
Greg:
So, does anyone know anything about the Fordham position? - One of our own got the job last year . . .
10.14.2005 1:08am
John Whitmire:
you guys really don't think it looks good? there are right around the same number (minus one or two, perhaps) continental ads in this jfp as in the corresponding one last year.

don't know anything about the fordham job at this point.
10.17.2005 11:44am
Chris Diehm (mail):
i haven't scoured the ads, but i did see that colby college is running a continental search, and i interviewed there last year and, in fact, was offered the job for which i interviewed (non tenure-track). i don't know that i have any sort of "inside line" on what they're looking for, but i'd be happy to talk about my specific experiences with them with anyone who is really keyed up about colby--which, by the way, is an unbelievably cool place with really great faculty. also, sally scholz is friends/associates with the department chair there...
10.20.2005 10:42am