Welcome back to the DRL Newsletter!

It’s almost the start of the 19/20 academic year, can you believe that! If you are planning a new course this year, do consider using the DRL to diversify your syllabus. And if you have a bit of spare time, you might want to contribute some of the fantastic texts you plan to use in your classes!

Have your say!

Final chance to take part in a short survey on how you use the DRL! Your answers will help us improve and further develop the List.

News

APA Diversity Grant

The DRL is pleased to say we have won the APA Diversity Grant. Barbara Cann (Cornell) will be using this money to go through our backlog of public contributions and turning them into ‘stub entries’ – ones that might miss teaching comments but will invite you, the readers, to submit your own comments and advice. We hope that this will become the first stage of a wider plan to make contributing new texts easier and quicker.

(in parenthesis) and DRL Collaboration

In our last newsletter we wrote about an excellent project, (in parenthesis), which celebrates the work of four women philosophers from Oxford: Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley. Since then, we began collaborating on a project aiming to add the content of their reading lists to the DRL database, including useful references to their teaching notes from the DRL, and possibly developing new complete reading lists based around the work of the Wartime Quartet.

Teaching Text from Ian Kidd

We have some great advice by James Ian Kidd in the Teach section of our website. The text focuses on how to avoid backfires and bad trade-offs when diversifying our curricula. Check it out!

Volunteer Spotlight: Alison Stone

I am a Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University. I have written a number of books, some of them on feminist philosophy such as An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (2007). I am an Assistant Editor for the DRL, having contacted Simon Fokt to offer my assistance in 2018, at a time when I was also an interim co-editor of the journal Hypatia. At that point I’d just begun work on my current project, which is a study of women’s contributions to nineteenth-century philosophy, especially in Britain and other English-speaking parts of the world. As part of that, I’m presently co-editing a special issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy on women in nineteenth-century philosophy, and I’m carrying out research in this area. Some of the better-known figures to be covered are Marian Evans (a.k.a. George Eliot), Harriet Martineau, Harriet Taylor Mill and Ada Lovelace. But there are many more women from that time whose names are now forgotten and yet who were big names in their day. So, anyway, I was keen to add to the DRL’s entries in history of early and late modern philosophy – as well as in continental European philosophy, which is another field of interest for me.

The DRL is such a valuable resource. Philosophy departments are increasingly starting to appreciate that syllabi, reading lists, course handbooks and so on need to be more inclusive than they have been and there really seems to be a growing interest amongst philosophers in diversifying and decolonising the philosophy curriculum. It is exciting to see the subject in a process of change.

Get involved, get funded!

We continuously expand our list and you can help us by contributing papers via our contribution page.

We couldn’t do what we do without the help of our fantastic volunteers. If you would like to join them and volunteer for us please get in touch! There are so many ways to get involved: reviewing public contributions; helping us with small one off jobs; becoming a regular editor; and promoting the DRL at events and online.

You might even be able to access funding to support your time working on the DRL like Emily Paul (see above). We’re keen to support any volunteers in getting this kind of funding. You can read more about this here.

Thanks so much again for all your support,

The DRL Team