Three newly hired Associate Professors of Philosophy, and one affiliated faculty member with a primary appointment in the Law School, will be joining the UVA Philosophy Department in August 2014:

Elizabeth Barnes will be joining the UVA Department of Philosophy in August of 2014.  Barnes and her husband Ross Cameron, who will also be joining UVA, are among a small handful of the most influential young specialists in metaphysics.  Together with Trenton Merricks, who has been at UVA since 2001, they make UVA one of the top metaphysics departments in the world.  Barnes received her PhD in 2006 from the University of St. Andrews, and has taught at the University of Leeds since that time, first as a lecturer and since 2010 as an Associate Professor.  In the eight years since completing her PhD, Barnes has published at least 17 articles in leading journals in philosophy, including Nous, Mind and Ethics.  Barnes is particularly known for her work on indeterminacy and vagueness, truth-makers, and emergence, but her philosophical interests extend well beyond metaphysics.  She has a book under contract with Oxford University Press on the nature of disability and its relation to well-being, and she is interested in the forms of thought that shape our understanding of disability and other social categories, including gender and race.  While at UVA she will be teaching courses on this entire array of topics, both at the undergraduate and at the graduate level.  Barnes has given invited talks at, among many other places, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Rutgers, and the Aristotelian Society.  She is Editor in Chief of the journal Philosophy Compass.

Ross Cameron will join the UVA Department of Philosophy in August of 2014.  Cameron and his wife Elizabeth Barnes, who will also be joining UVA, are among a handful of the most influential young metaphysicians at work today.  With Trenton Merricks already on hand, the arrival of Cameron and Barnes establishes UVA as one of the best places in the country to work in this area.  Cameron earned his PhD from the University of St. Andrews in 2006.  In 2006 he became a Lecturer in Philosophy at Leeds, and in 2009 he was made Associate Professor.  Since December 2009 Cameron has also been an Associate Fellow at the Northern Institute of Philosophy (Aberdeen).  From 2006 to 2011 he was an Associate Fellow at the Arché Research Centre (St Andrews) and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews.  In the eight years since he has received his PhD, he has published at least 33 papers, has co-edited an anthology, and has written a book that is now under contract with Oxford University Press.  Cameron’s work addresses a wide array of topics in metaphysics, including truthmakers, the nature of ontological commitment, the theory of parts and wholes, the logical structure of dependence, conventionalism about necessity and possibility, and—the subject of his forthcoming book—the philosophy of time.

Walter Ott, a gifted and prolific historian of modern philosophy, will be joining the UVA Philosophy Department as an Associate Professor in August of 2014.  With Antonia LoLordo and Jorge Secada already on hand (not to mention John Simmons, who is perhaps the world’s foremost authoritiy on Locke’s political philosophy), Ott’s arrival will solidify UVA’s stature as one of the nation’s premier programs in the history of modern philosophy.   Ott, who has been an Associate Professor in the Virginia Tech Philosophy Department since 2009, is especially well known for his work on Locke, Malebranche, Descartes and Hume.  He has published two excellent and highly regarded books in the history of philosophy: Locke’s Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, 2004), and Causation and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford 2009).  He currently has a third book manuscript, The New Riddle of Sensation, under review.  Ott has published a long list of influential essays in some of the most distinguished journals in the profession, and has also put together an open-source textbook of modern philosophy, combining selections from primary sources with introductions, annotations and exercises.

Kimberly Ferzan, a distinguished philosopher of law, has joined the UVA Law School and will be an affiliate of the UVA Philosophy Department.  Ferzan has served on the faculty of Rutgers University School of Law since 2000, most recently as Distinguished Professor of Law, Associate Graduate Faculty member of the Philosophy Department, and Co-Director of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy.  At Rutgers, Ferzan received the campus-wide Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2010, and she was selected as Professor of the Year by the Classes of 2004 and 2010.  Ferzan teaches criminal law, evidence, advanced criminal law, and advanced law and philosophy seminars.  Her courses on legal philosophy will count towards graduate degree requirements within the UVA Philosophy Department.  Ferzan is co-editor in chief of Law and Philosophy, and is also on the editorial boards of Legal Theory and Criminal Law and Philosophy. She is the author of numerous articles, and the co-author of Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law (Cambridge University Press), with Larry Alexander and Stephen Morse.  Her paper, "Beyond Crime and Commitment," was selected for the 2013 American Philosophical Association's Berger Memorial Prize, for the best paper written in law and philosophy for the prior two years, and her paper, "Beyond Intention," was selected for the 2006 Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum in the category of criminal law.  She is currently at work on a book about self-defense and its relation to the theory of preventive detention.  Ferzan has been a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania Law Schools.  For the academic year 2012-13, Ferzan was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton's University Center for Human Values.