Katherine Kirby, St Michael's College assistant professor of philosophy, was named recipient of the top award presented to a faculty member of a Vermont Campus Compact member campus at the 2011 Statewide Awards Ceremony held April 7 at the Capitol Plaza conference Center in Montpelier.
“Professor Kirby is able to ground her service learning in intellectual traditions,” said Saint Michael’s President John Neuhauser in presenting the award. “In teaching the philosophy of Levinas she is able to help her students recognize the personhood of the marginalized,” he said.
Professor Kirby was noted especially for the way she combines difficult philosophical content with service learning in a way to help clarify the philosophical concepts for her students. Her advanced philosophy course, “Otherness and Marginalization: Levinas and the Alienated,” challenges students to understand Levinas’s concept of otherness by exposing them to categories of people such as the poor, the ill, and the elderly. They work to understand what it means to encounter “the other.”
To bring this concept to life for her students, Dr. Kriby extends the course with an international component that focuses on how the developing world is often marginalized by more developed countries. Her students travel to Guyana, South America, and work with individuals at Palms Geriatric Institution, St. John Bosco Boys’s Orphanage, and the Mahaica Leprosy Hospital. Students also paired their study of Levinas with service-learning partnerships locally with senior citizens at St. Joseph Residential Care Home in Burlington. Through combining philosophy and service work Professor Kirby brings her students to understand hard-to-grasp philosophy of Levinas and “otherness.” Her classes have a reputation of being transformative for her students.
Dr. Kirby’s recent journal publications include "The Hero and Asymmetrical Obligation: Levinas and Ricoeur in Dialogue," which appeared in the June 2010 issue of International Philosophical Quarterly and "Encountering and Understanding Suffering: The Need for Service-Learning in Ethical Education," which appeared in the June 2009 issue of Teaching Philosophy. She presented that work at the 2009North American Levinas Society conference in Toronto. Another of her articles entitled "War and Peace, Power and Faith" was released in the book, X-Men and Philosophy, in 2009.
Dr. Kirby, who came to Saint Michael’s in 2006 after earning her doctorate from Fordham University, lives in Winooski.