Our Graduate Students
First off, several new workshops and reading groups have kicked off this year. Naila Jubara and Maddox Larson have brought together students, professors, and post-docs for the new Social Ontology Reading Group (SORG). A number of students have also come together to form the Public Philosophy Working Group through which Gabriel Sanchez Ainsa organized a workshop on public philosophy with Professor Sasha Mudd, the philosopher-at-large for The Point Magazine, who spoke about how to write and pitch public-facing work to popular outlets. Several members of the group also wrote pieces for the Blog of the American Philosophical Association including Virginia Moscetti, Calvin Bell III, Isaac Shur, Gabriel Schatt, and Gabriel Sanchez Ainsa Special thanks to Virginia for facilitating many of these posts in her capacity as the Public Philosophy series editor for the Blog!
Our grad students continue to represent the department at a variety of professional conferences. Isaac Shur presented at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian and Mind societies, and the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress. Calvin Bell III presented at the Philosophy Born of Struggle Conference and the Roundtable for Feminist and Womanist Theory 6th Annual Meeting. Dominique Codjia presented at Marquette University’s 2025 Aquinas Lecture Conference. Bernardo Barzana was invited to present for the Philosophizing the Anthropocene conference the University of Padua. Samuel Filby presented at the meeting of the North American Nietzsche Society at the Pacific APA. Abigail Iturra presented at the Philosophy and Social Science conference in Prague, and the Heidegger Circle at the Eastern APA where her paper received an honorable mention for the Circle’s Theodore Kisiel Junior Scholar Essay Award. Our grad students also continue to assist the department with organizing conferences of our own. Isaac Shur and Noam Weinreich served as the main grad student organizers for the NUSTEP and NU/ND conferences, respectively. They both also appreciate the help which many other students contributed the review process for both conferences!
Several of our graduate students received awards and fellowships this year. Gabriel Sanchez Ainsa was awarded the McCarthy Award for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy. Claire Beccera was fellow for Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institutes (PIKSI) in Boston. Sydney Maxwell received the Cognitive Science Advanced Research Fellowship. And Calvin Bell III was selected for Northwestern's 2026 Dissertation Proposal Development Program, was one of the Kaplan Public Humanities Graduate Practicum Fellows, and was invited to be a part of a panel on the Black prophetic tradition held at Morehouse College for the inaugural Dean's Forum.
To highlight a couple other accomplishments, Bernardo Barzana published a review of Christoph Schuringa’s book Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, and Sam Filby was featured on the official podcast of the Iris Murdoch Society!
Penultimately, we’d like to draw special attention to several graduate students who will soon no longer be graduate students due to their success on the job market! Amongst them are Sam Filby, Kenni Zellner, and Mark Gorthey, who have all secured post-doctoral positions at various institutions. Congratulations everyone!
Finally, our graduate students continue to create something even more valuable than their philosophical research: friendship and community. Sooraj Saksena organized Dal by the Lake, where he treated everyone to some home cooking. Lazlo Katona brought together graduate students from a variety of departments in the Chicago area for Philosoparty. And of course, Gabriel Sanchez Ainsa continues to organize Tea Time, where faculty and grad students come to together to drink tea, be merry, and most importantly: gossip. Gabriel also habitually asks faculty guests a classic question: what is philosophy for? What is the good of it? To close out, we’d like to share the various answers which faculty have imparted to the graduate students as Tea Time this year:
Rachel Zuckert: “Thinking.”
Megan Hyska: “Human dignity.”
Pascal Brixel: “Understanding, rather than knowledge. But in practical philosophy, understanding may be essentially subservient to some practical end—justice, or the good.”
Morgan Thompson: “Philosophy is for many different things because philosophy has many different goals and methods. In the philosophy of science, philosophy can be for rationally reconstructing the arguments used by scientists, critiquing scientific norms and incentives, directly contributing to scientific knowledge, indirectly contributing to scientific knowledge by, e.g., clarifying scientific concepts, or even liberatory projects of imaging better scientific institutions and communities for improving well-being or creating more just societies.”
Richard Kraut: “Philosophy as it has been practiced since the ancient Greeks is not subordinate to any person or field but inquires about the deepest matters. It is free to arrive at whatever ideas and conclusions are best supported by reason. It opens and broadens the mind to grapple with philosophical questions and debates. Its topics are fascinating and enduring. It also has instrumental value, because so often in everyday life we need to think hard to analyze our problems.”
Corey Barnes: “Philosophy is good only if it improves our world in some way. Its goodness does not lie in its satisfying our intellectual curiosity, but rather in it helping us to think more clearly about how we live, how we treat each other, and what kind of world we ought to be building together.”