Elisabeth Camp: January 2012

Elisabeth Camp is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She attended college at the University of Michigan and got her PhD from UC Berkeley before spending three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She then taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 2006 until joining Rutgers in 2013. Camp’s research focuses on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit standard propositional models. She has done extensive work on metaphor and other forms of figurative speech such as sarcasm, and on the rhetorical effects of promulgating and manipulating cognitive ‘frames’ or perspectives. A recent strand of work focuses on slurs and other forms of loaded language, and on how conversational dynamics are affected when a speaker and hearer are antagonistic or uncertain about the degree of alignment in their interests and commitments. In addition, she has also done work on concepts, on non-human animal cognition, and on non-sentential representational systems, such as maps and diagrams.

Camp has published in journals including Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies and Philosophical Quarterly, and was awarded a Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2010. She regularly teaches courses in philosophy of mind, language, aesthetics, and Wittgenstein. With Elizabeth Harman (Princeton) and Jill North (Cornell), she is currently organizing a series of mentoring workshops for graduate women in philosophy, the first of which will be held at Princeton in August 2014.