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Janet McCracken, Lake Forest College

Provenance: Janet McCracken, Lake Forest College
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Janet McCracken

Professor of Philosophy
Lake Forest College

I am the immediate past-Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Lake Forest College, now happily returned to full-time teaching. My main area in philosophy is aesthetics, or the study or art and beauty. At Lake Forest I teach aesthetics, cinema studies, ancient Greek philosophy, early modern European philosophy, philosophy of economics, philosophy of gender, and I "moonlight" for the communication department, teaching cinema studies.

I have published two books, Taste and the Household: The Domestic Aesthetic and Moral Reasoning from SUNY Press and Thinking About Gender: A Historical Anthology from Wadsworth Publishing. My recent articles include reflections on grief and on the aesthetics of recycling. My more recent work on animal studies includes an article on images of animals in Plato's Republic (under submission) and teaching a senior seminar at Lake Forest College on the philosophy of humans and animals.

I hope very much, with the support of my leadership-teammates, to expand Lake Forest's offerings in animal studies. Certainly I would like to create interdisciplinary courses, and philosophy courses for sophomores and juniors, so that studying animals doesn't seem arcane, but rather an integral part of any serious college education.

I have long been interested in the realm of domesticity, and its relation to "the wild". Hence, I have current projects on the ethics of tameness and wildness,and on Western movies and their relation to wildness in America.