Jennifer McWeeny is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of philosophy of mind, philosophy of gender, philosophy of race, phenomenology, Asian and comparative philosophy, decolonial studies, and early modern philosophy.
Prof. McWeeny’s research explores the bodily, historical, and social dimensions of mental phenomena such as consciousness, emotion, and perception, and attends to the ways that living within social categories such as gender, race, class, and ability affects the content and perspectival structure of experience. She has also developed cross-cultural philosophical methodologies that engage diverse perspectives along multiple axes (cultural, historical, social, political, and disciplinary).
She has published more than twenty-five articles and book chapters on subjects such as consciousness, panpsychism, mental attribution, motor intentionality, anger, jealousy, self-consciousness, decolonial feminism, philosophy of race, animal ethics, and Buddhism. She is the editor of two books: Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones (2019) co-edited with Pedro DiPietro and Shireen Roshanravan, and Asian and Feminist Philosophies in Dialogue: Liberating Traditions (2014) co-edited with Ashby Butnor.
Prof. McWeeny is a recipient of the Fulbright France National Research Award (2020) and a current member of the Fulbright Association and Fulbright National Steering Committee. She has served as Executive Secretary for the Eastern Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy (2006-2009) and as the Director of the Fortieth Annual Meeting of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle (2015). She is Editor in Chief of the award-winning, multidisciplinary journal Simone de Beauvoir Studies (2016-present).
Jennifer McWeeny was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 2005. Mark Johnson, author of Metaphors We Live By (1980) and The Body in the Mind (1990), among many other works, was her dissertation advisor. While at the University of Oregon, she also worked closely with Naomi Zack, John Lysaker, and Don Levi. Prof. McWeeny received a Master’s degree in comparative philosophy from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 2000. Vrinda Dalmiya was her advisor, and she also studied with Arindam Chakrabarti, Eliot Deutsch, Roger Ames, Mary Tiles, and Rodney Roberts. Prof. McWeeny holds an M.A. in French literature from the University of Oregon, a graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies from the University of Oregon, and a B.A. in biology and philosophy (double-major) from The Colorado College.
When she is not reading and writing, Prof. McWeeny takes to the trails. She is an avid runner, hiker, and nature-lover.
