Fall 2024 Faculty News & Accomplishments

Professor Yuri Balashov was recently awarded a National Science Foundation grant to support his interdisciplinary project exploring cognitive, linguistic, and philosophical aspects of human and machine translation. Balashov's research is a bottom-up case study of the history and current state of translation technologies conducted from the complementary perspectives of multiple disciplines and informed by first-hand knowledge of human and machine translation.

In October, professor Chris Cuomo gave the Distinguished Lecture in Environmental Ethics at Colorado State University, presenting her essay “Caring about Nature: Necessary Responses to Our Climate Crisis,” and she was featured in the University of Toronto School of the Environment Seminar Series on “Environmental Ethics and Marginalized Wisdom: Chasms, Bridges, Flight Patterns.” In November, she participated in the panel “Billion Dollar Barbie: Pop Culture & Barbiemania,” sponsored by the UGA Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Department of Theater and Film Studies. She is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Climate Justice Praxis with Sarah Kenehan.

Associate professor and undergraduate coordinator Melissa Fahmy was selected to be a part of the 2024-2025 cohort of The UGA Humanities Seminar, sponsored by Franklin College, The Willson Center for Humanities and the Arts, and the Office of Research. She is also the recent recipient of Henry Allison Senior Scholar Prize for her paper, “Never Merely as a Means: Rethinking the Role and Relevance of Consent.” In September, Fahmy participated in the 14th International Kant Congress hosted by the University of Bonn, where she presented her paper, “On Pain and Other Degraded States: Respecting Embodied Rational Nature and Physician-Assisted Death.” While in Bonn, she also participated in the Kant on Means, Ends, and Trolleys workshop, where she presented her recent work on lying. 

Distinguished Research Professor and Josiah Meigs Teaching Professor Edward Halper’s paper on “Piety and Moderation,” is now available in Xenophon's Virtues, edited by Gabriel Danzig, David Johnson, David Konstan, from De Gruyter. Halper gave two papers in June: “Soul in the Republic” at The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Plato’s Republic workshop at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City; and “Plato’s Parmenides: Philosophical Cubism” at the 8^th Platonic Summer Seminar, in Lanckorona, Poland. Dr. Halper also served as an outside reviewer of the Department of Philosophy at Emory University in Spring 2024.

Associate professor René Jagnow presented the paper “On the Spatial Representational Contents of Afterimage Experiences” at the annual meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Grenoble, France in July, and in October he presented the paper “Polaroid Memories: Photographs and the Aesthetic Character of Episodic Memories” at the 82^nd annual meeting of the American Association for Aesthetics in Chicago. 

In May, department head and professor Aaron Meskin, published an essay entitled “Oishinbo and Food Aesthetics” in Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics Case Studies. In August, he published a co-authored paper on the use of AI in the classroom, which appeared in TextGenEd: Continuing Experiments. During the summer of 2024, Meskin delivered papers at the American Society for Aesthetics Rocky Mountain Division Meeting, the Canadian Philosophical Association Annual Meeting, and at the first annual Pioneer Valley Aesthetics Workshop.

Associate professor and undergraduate advisor, Athanasios Samaras presented two papers in October: ‘The Oikos in Plato’s Republic’ in an online meeting of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy and “The Constitutions of Lycurgus and Solon and Plato’s Friends and Enemies in the Laws’ in Plato’s ‘Friends and Enemies’” at Ateliers de la Société d'Études Platoniciennes in Lyon, France.

In May 2024, Distinguished Research Professor Richard Winfield gave two talks in Brazil: “The Liberation of Philosophical Psychology: Unshackling Mind from the Dogmas Barring Its True Self-Conception,” at the LEME Seminar Series, organized by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro; and “Reason in the History of Philosophy: How Philosophy Must Conceive Its Own Development”, at the Philosophy Department, University of Brasilia. In September, Dr. Winfield delivered a paper at “Philosophy Without Foundations,” an online colloquium organized by the Society for Systemic Philosophy in honor of former Clemson University professor, William Maker.