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I received my PhD in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 2002. My dissertation on skepticism was supervised by Michael Williams and Richard Bett. While a graduate student in Baltimore, I taught courses at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
My undergraduate degree is from the University of Pennsylvania. My BA was an individualized degree granted by the Department of Philosophy although, in fact, I took very few philosophy courses as an undergraduate (especially by Canadian standards). I discovered philosophy late in my undergraduate career. Unbeknownst to my mentor in the biochem lab where I worked, I started sneaking off to take philosophy in my 3rd and 4th years after taking an intro course by James Ross and falling hard for philosophy and philosophers.
My current work is on epistemic agency: What kind of control and responsibility do we have with respect to our beliefs? What kind of control and responsibility do we have for the beliefs of others via our engagement with institutions that either foster or undermine particular interpretations or beliefs? My research is centred in analytic epistemology but draws from, and engages with, work in feminist philosophy, ethics, philosophy of language, action theory, philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
Given the focus of our department’s themed MA (Self, Agency, Community), most of the graduate courses I have taught at 51本色 have been on 1 aspect or another of epistemic agency: doxastic voluntarism, responsibility for ignorance, epistemic injustice. I supervise students interested in these topics, but also more broadly in analytic epistemology, feminist epistemology/metaphysics, and issues at the intersection of ethics and epistemology.
- Rusin, Jill. “Characterizing Skepticism’s Import.” International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 2:2 (2012), 99-114.
- Rusin, Jill. “Reconciling Epistemic Duty with Non-Voluntary Belief.” The International Journal of the Humanities 8:8 (2010), 95-102.
- Rusin, Jill and Mark Franke. “Self-Understanding and the Refugee Claimant.” The International Journal of the Humanities 8:3 (2010), 187-198.
Contact Info:
F: 519.884.5465
Office location: P343
Office hours:
Tuesdays, 11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Languages spoken: English