Deborah Goldgaber
Associate Professor of Philosophy Section Head of Philosophy Director of the LSU Ethics Institute Jointly Appointed in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 106 Coates Hall 225-578-1043 |
Deborah Goldgaber is Associate Professor in Philosophy at LSU with a joint appointment in Women’s and Gender Studies and Director, since 2019, of the LSU Ethics Institute. At the Institute, she has piloted initiatives on Data Ethics, Ethical AI, the ethics of memorialization and Critical Carceral Studies among others. As the recipient of grants from the NSF and the Louisiana Board of Regents, through the Embedding Ethics in STEM @ LSU project, she has worked with LSU faculty to expand moral literacy across STEM fields through innovative partnerships with the humanities.
Professor Goldgaber received her PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University, and specializes in European philosophy, feminist philosophy, ethics and epistemology. Her research is wide-ranging, with interests in the nature of scientific knowledge and its limits, how inclusive values in science can expand objectivity, and how social hierarchies produce ignorance. She has published extensively in areas related to nature of memory, cultural and biological plasticity, the effects of technological prosthesis (including literacy) and, most recently, the shifting meaning of information across disciplinary domains. Her scholarly monography, Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and the New Materialsim (Edinburgh, 2021), extends French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s grammatological framing to examine the expansion of the metaphor of writing and code to include the domains of biology and information sciences.
B.A. in Economics and Political Science, Vanderbilt University (2000)
M.A. in Philosophy, The New School for Social Research (2004)
Ph.D. in Philosophy, Northwestern University (2014)
PHIL 1000: Introduction to Philosophy
PHIL 2786: History and Philosophy of STEM
PHIL 3001: Existentialism
PHIL 3020: Foundations of Critical Theory
PHIL 3020/WGSS 4500: Race, Sex, Science
PHIL 4936: 19th-Century European Philosophy
PHIL 4949: Topic in the Philosophy of Sex and Gender
PHIL 7905: Graduate Seminar in Continental Philosophy
HNRS 2030: AI and the Future of the Human
WGSS 7150: Graduate Survey in Feminist Philosophy
Co-Principal Investigator, POSE II (Pathway to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems II-NSF) -- $1.5M (2024)
Principal Investigator, Provost Fund for Research & Creative Activity (2024)
Co-Principal Investigator, “Working Group: AI, Ethics and Automation,” The Center for Collaborative Knowledge (2023-2024)
Co-Principal Investigator, National Academy of Science, Gulf Scholars Program -- $450K (2021-2025)
Principal Investigator, “Embedding Ethics in STEM,” Louisiana Board of Regents, Enhancement Grant -- $104K (2021-2022)
Senior Personnel, POSE I (Pathway to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems-NSF) -- $300K (2021-2022)
Recipient of Manship Summer Research Fellowship (2021)
Fellow, for the Moral Theory Project, LSU Ethics Institute (2018)
Recipient of ATLAS Grant, Louisiana Board of Regents -- $56K (2017)
Recipient of Council on Research, Summer Research Stipend (2017)
Books
Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and The New Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021)
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Chapters
"'More Space Than Time’: Amodality, ‘Dark Phenomenology’ and Speculative Realism," in After Speculative Realism (forthcoming with Bloomsbury, 2025)
"Missing the Mark: Aestheticization, Structure Inattention, and ‘Dark Phenomenology,’" in Phenomenology, Ontology, Metaphysics, Brill Research in Phenomenology (forthcoming, 2024)
"Analogies or Ontologies? On the ‘Unreasonable Effectiveness’ of ‘Code’ in the History of the Life Sciences” The Oxford Literary Review 45 (2024): 186-207
"On Recovering the Past: Textual 'Reversibility' in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!," CR: The New Centennial Review 21 (2021): 207-35
"Matter and Indifference: Realism and Anti-Realism in Feminist Accounts of the Body,’ in Idealism, Relativism, Realism. New Essays on Objectivity Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide, ed. Dominik Finkelde and Paul M. Livingston (Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), 1:193-214
"'Morphogenesis' in New Materialist Thought," Philosophy Today 63 (2019): 999-1012
"Plasticity, Technicity, Writing," Parallax 25 (2019): 137-54
"Return to the Repressive: Re-thinking Nature- Culture in Contemporary Feminist Theory," Open Philosophy 1 (2018): 245-55
“Derrida and Translation,” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, ed. J Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2018), 141-56.
"The Plasticity of Writing": Malabou and the Limits of Grammatology," inThinking Catherine Malabou: Passionate Detachments, ed. Thomas Wormald and Isabell Dahms (London: Roman & Littlefield, 2018), 39-56
"Programmed to Fail? On the Limits of Inscription and the Generality of Writing," Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31 (2017): 444-57
Ethics Institute Collaborations
Maria Bampasidou, Deborah Goldgaber, Thanos Gentimis, Anurag Mandalika (2024), “’Overcoming ‘Digital Divides’: Leveraging higher education to develop next generation digital agriculture professionals, Computers and Electronics in Agriculture" 224 (1)
with Anurag Mandalika (2024). “Ethics of AI and Automation in Digital Agriculture,” Choices: Journal of the Agriculture and Applied Economics Association
Book Reviews
Review Essay, "Francisco Vitale’s Biodeconstruction," Derrida Today 13 (2020): 114-21
Review Essay, "Derrida’s The Death Penalty Vol. II.," Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2017)