The Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (CBWP) is an organization which was created to increase the visibility of black women in the field of philosophy and to allow greater networking and mentoring opportunities for these women. The organization is currently based at Penn State University. [1]
The first meeting of CBWP took place in 2007. [2] The organization was founded by Kathryn Belle. [3] [4] Belle felt that it was important to address the issue of the small number of black women in the field of philosophy. [5] Belle reached out black women by email and was able to contact all thirty-one African American women professors, many of which were able to attend the first conference. [6] The first conference was held at Vanderbilt University in 2008 and included Joyce Mitchell Cook, the first African American woman to earn a PhD in philosophy. [7]
Vanderbilt University is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1 million endowment in the hopes that his gift and the greater work of the university would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the American Civil War. Vanderbilt is a founding member of the Southeastern Conference and has been the conference's only private school since 1966.
Black studies or Africana studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field that primarily focuses on the study of the history, culture, and politics of the peoples of the African diaspora and Africa. The field includes scholars of African-American, Afro-Canadian, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, Afro-European, Afro-Asian, African Australian, and African literature, history, politics, and religion as well as those from disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, education, and many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. The field also uses various types of research methods.
Teachers College, Columbia University (TC) is the graduate school of education of Columbia University, a private research university in New York City. Founded in 1887, Teachers College has served as one of the official Faculties and the Department of Education of Columbia University since 1898. It is the oldest and largest graduate school of education in the United States.
Pan-Africanism is a worldwide movement that aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all indigenous peoples and diasporas of African ancestry. Based on a common goal dating back to the Atlantic slave trade, the movement extends beyond continental Africans with a substantial support base among the African diaspora in the Americas and Europe.
Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA and a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S).
Jean Paulette Bethke Elshtain (1941–2013) was an American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual. She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the University of Chicago Divinity School with a joint appointment in the department of political science.
The Vanderbilt Commodores are the intercollegiate athletic teams that represent Vanderbilt University, located in Nashville, Tennessee. Vanderbilt fields 16 varsity teams, 14 of which compete at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I level as a member of the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Vanderbilt's women's lacrosse team plays in the American Athletic Conference. The bowling team plays in Conference USA (C-USA), which absorbed Vanderbilt's former bowling home of the Southland Bowling League after the 2022–23 season. The University of Tennessee Volunteers are Vanderbilt's primary athletic rival, and the only other SEC team in Tennessee.
Women have made significant contributions to philosophy throughout the history of the discipline. Ancient examples include Maitreyi, Gargi Vachaknavi, Hipparchia of Maroneia and Arete of Cyrene. Some women philosophers were accepted during the medieval and modern eras, but none became part of the Western canon until the 20th and 21st century, when some sources indicate that Simone Weil Susanne Langer, G.E.M. Anscombe, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir entered the canon.
Anita LaFrance Allen is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She was formerly Vice Provost for Faculty from 2013 to 2020.
Carlin Romano is an American writer and educator. Romano writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Brian Leiter is an American philosopher and legal scholar who is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and founder and Director of Chicago's Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values. A review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews described Leiter as "one of the most influential legal philosophers of our time", while a review in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies described Leiter's book Nietzsche on Morality (2002) as "arguably the most important book on Nietzsche's philosophy in the past twenty years."
Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting is a feminist scholar and Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University where she serves as Vice Provost of Arts and Libraries as well as Director of the Callie House Research Center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics. She served as Associate Provost for Academic Advancement from October 2021-June 2022. She was also the Chair of African American and Diaspora Studies until August 2022. She is editor of The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union", and editor of the academic journal Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. She is also series co-editor of "Philosophy and Race" with philosopher Robert Bernasconi.
Marilyn Ann Friedman is an American philosopher. She holds the W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
Kathryn Sophia Belle, formerly known as Kathryn T. Gines, is an American philosopher. She is associate professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. Much of her work has focused on increasing diversity within philosophy, and she is the founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers.
Scarritt College for Christian Workers was a college associated with the United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. The campus is now home to Scarritt Bennett Center.
Joyce Mitchell Cook was an American philosopher. She was the first African American woman to receive a PhD in philosophy in the United States. After earning that degree from Yale University, she was the first female teaching assistant allowed at the university. She went on to teach at Wellesley College, Connecticut College, Howard University. She served for several years as an analyst for African affairs at the State Department in Washington, D.C.
Martha Minerva Franklin was an African-American nurse, one of the first people to campaign for racial equality in nursing.
Jedidah C. Isler is an American astrophysicist, educator, and an active advocate for diversity in STEM. She became the first African-American woman to complete her PhD in astrophysics at Yale in 2014. She is currently an assistant professor of astrophysics at Dartmouth College. Her research explores the physics of blazars and examines the jet streams emanating from them. In November 2020, Isler was named a member of Joe Biden's presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Emilie Maureen Townes is an American Christian social ethicist and theologian. She was Dean, E. Rhodes, and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Townes was the first African-American woman to be elected president of the American Academy of Religion in 2008. She also served as the president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion from 2012–2016.
Paul Christopher Taylor is an American philosopher, author, and was W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University until moving to UCLA in the summer of 2023. Previously he taught philosophy and African American studies at Pennsylvania State University. He writes on race theory, aesthetics, pragmatism, social and political philosophy, and Africana philosophy.