Humanities and Arts

Contact Information

Office:
Salisbury Laboratories, 109
Phone: +1-508-831-5388
Fax: +1-508-831-5932
jmcweeny@wpi.edu

Jennifer McWeeny

• Associate Professor, Humanities & Arts
• Affiliated with:
  • Philosophy & Religion

Jennifer McWeeny is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Humanities and Arts Department. Her training in philosophy is pluralistic in nature, engaging work from a variety of schools and traditions including Continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, feminist philosophy, and Asian and comparative philosophies. This creative approach is premised on the idea that juxtaposing diverse perspectives often yields deeper philosophical insights than do tradition-specific methods.

In her research, Professor McWeeny primarily studies the role that our embodiment plays in the production of knowledge and perception. Her research program aims to provide a robust account of embodied cognition at the levels of intentionality, emotion, consciousness, and perception. She is especially interested in theorizing the cognitive aspects of pre-reflective experience; considering the ways that placing different kinds of bodies at the center of philosophical analysis alters our traditional accounts of phenomena; and analyzing how the categories of gender, race, sexuality, and species emerge in experience as a primary means of categorizing and understanding bodies. The philosophers that she most admires are Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Margaret Cavendish, and Maria Lugones. She also has professional interests in literature, neuroscience, and Gestalt therapy.

Professor McWeeny’s approach to teaching philosophy grows from the idea that philosophy at its best is a dynamic practice and a way of thinking and living, rather than a static body of facts, theories, and terms. She believes that a course should be structured around the students who take it and she works to uncover her students’ most deeply-held beliefs so that they can be submitted to philosophical examination. Professor McWeeny also believes that students thrive when they are challenged intellectually. Characteristic of Professor McWeeny’s pedagogy is an express commitment to engage multiple levels of philosophical diversity in the best tradition of liberal arts education. To this end, she makes a point to represent a wide variety of thinkers and philosophical positions in her course designs, especially in terms of intellectual traditions, geographic regions, genders, races, cultures, and social locations. Moreover, she provides students with ample opportunities to explore the course material from different cognitive angles: intellectually, pragmatically, emotionally, and experientially/phenomenologically.

Before coming to WPI in 2012, Professor McWeeny was Associate Professor of philosophy at John Carroll University where she taught a wide-range of courses in non-Western philosophies, epistemology, philosophy of mind, feminist philosophy, Continental philosophy, and the history of philosophy. She is currently working on a book project on embodied phenomenology and looking forward to sharing philosophical conversations and intellectual collaborations with her WPI students.