Please join me in welcoming Dr. John Lawless and Dr. Katharine Landers to our Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) affiliated faculty. Both scholars come to Illinois State from Utica University in upstate New York.
Professor Landers’ scholarship focuses on English women’s writing and dress in the early modern period and how the idea of women’s clothing and of visuality-legible stages of life has the power to reframe political thought. Her current book project, Dressing Authority: The Politics of Fashion in English Women’s Writing 1616-1676, considers how women writers including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Clifford, and Mary Carleton use politically charged discourses of resistant dress to call into question centralized monarchical control while still maintaining stances of Stuart loyalty. She will be teaching Intro to Studies in Women’s Writing, Gender in the Humanities, and History of Literature by Women.
Professor Lawless joins our community as a joint hire between the African American Studies Program and the Department of Philosophy. He will be teaching Basic Issues in Philosophy and Philosophy of Law in the fall.
His research interests lie at the intersections of the philosophy of law with the philosophies of race and gender. His current book project draws on republican political and legal theory to develop a productive theory of race and gender within the racialized (or herrenvolk) republic; at the same time, it draws on social metaphysics and the philosophy of language to develop a productive conception of the legal subject. He argues that in the herrenvolk republic, whiteness is a coalition whose members engage in constant negotiation over the boundaries of whiteness, and who arrive at these negotiations with distinctive interests and unequal resources. His teaching is broadly in the philosophy of morals, politics, law, economics, race, and gender. He was active in diversifying the philosophy curriculum at his previous institution, having designed and taught two new courses: African American Political Philosophy and a Philosophy of Gender.
The development of these courses reflects his broader commitment to diversifying the curriculum and the cultivation of an inclusive campus. Utica’s Office of Student Affairs awarded him the Faculty/Student Affairs Partner Award in spring 2020, for his ongoing commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom and beyond. He was also awarded the Outstanding Faculty Allyship Award in spring 2021.
