Welcome Andrea Pitts!

We are pleased to announce Humphrey Chair in Feminist Philosophy Andrea Pitts to the philosophy department for the fall term. Andrea is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte and is affiliate faculty of the university’s Department of Africana Studies, the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies, the Latin American Studies Program, the School of Data Science, the Social Aspects of Health Initiative, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. 

Their research interests include Latin American and U.S. Latinx philosophy, critical philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, and critical prison studies, and they have taught graduate and undergraduate courses on topics such as Latina/x feminist philosophy, queer migration studies, prison abolitionism, critical transgender politics, and feminist epistemology.

Andrea is author of Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance (SUNY Press 2021), and co-editor of Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson with Mark Westmoreland (SUNY Press 2019) and Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance with Mariana Ortega and José M. Medina (Oxford University Press 2020). Andrea also co-organizes, along with Perry Zurn, the Trans Philosophy Project, a professional and research initiative dedicated to supporting trans, nonbinary, and gender variant philosophers.

Andrea is teaching the PHIL 422/673/675/GSJ 472 seminar this term on 'Health, Punishment, and Carceral Medicine.' The course examines the shifting functions of “health” and “punishment” within 19th and 20th century Canadian and U.S. discourses of social order, modernization, and penology. The primary objective of the course is to familiarize students with the historical and contemporary relationships between health care and punishment industries, and to demonstrate forms of politicized response to uses of “health” and “punishment” as methods for normalization, exclusion, patterned neglect, and genocide.

Topics examined within the course include: social hygiene movements, immigration policy and regulation, forced sterilization practices, Indigenous boarding/residential schools, the emergence of asylums and penitentiaries, environmental and medical racism, and the institutionalization of the field of correctional health care. The course will also examine responses to these issues by engaging the work of radical health care organizers, disability justice activists, the reproductive justice movement, prison abolitionists, and decolonial movements. 

We are honoured to welcome Andrea as the Humphrey Chair in our department!