John Jeremy Stuhr (born November 28, 1951) is an American philosopher who teaches at Emory University. He has written extensively about a wide assortment of philosophical figures and movements as well as a broad array of cultural problems and issues. His work is known for its lively, engaged, and direct style. He draws critically on thinkers from often separated philosophical traditions (such as Pragmatism, Neopragmatism, Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Postmodernism, and Deconstruction). Revealing his impatience with narrow and academic conceptions of philosophy, his writings make deep and consistent use of poetry, painting, photography, and the lyrics of contemporary music, and they exhibit a broad interdisciplinary reach across fields such as rhetoric, media studies, relativity theory, political and legal theory, cultural geography, and economics.
Early life
Stuhr's mother was a philosophy professor who left the academy for politics and public service. His father, an aspiring poet, left the humanities and arts after World War II to become a founding partner in the country's first consulting firm to provide strategic planning for colleges and universities. He also served as Executive Director of the Economic Club of Chicago. Growing up in the Chicago area and surrounded at home by philosophy and poetry and liberal politics, Stuhr attended New Trier High School. He then earned his B.A. in philosophy from Carleton College, studying with philosophers Roy Elveton, Gary Iseminger, Maury Landsman, and Perry Mason, classics scholar David H. Porter, and economist Robert E. Will. Abandoning at the last moment his plans for law school, in less than three years he earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, where he studied with John J. Compton, Michael Hodges, Charles E. Scott, and Robert C. Williams. Under the direction of John Lachs, he wrote a dissertation, Experience as Activity: Dewey’s Metaphysics, focused on pragmatism and its historical roots in the thought of Aristotle and Hegel.
Career
Stuhr began his teaching career at the age of 24. After a year as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England, he taught for a decade as assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor at Whitman College. He moved to the University of Oregon to become a professor of philosophy and the founding director of the Oregon Humanities Center. In 1994 he accepted appointment as head of the department of philosophy at Penn State University (and its more than 20 campuses) where he also was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies. In 2003 he moved back to Vanderbilt University to become W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and American Studies. In 2008, having chaired an external review of the department two years earlier, he accepted Emory University's offer to become Chair of the department of philosophy (2008–2016) and Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies.
Throughout his university administrative work, Stuhr has evidenced strong commitment to philosophical pluralism and institutional diversity, a push for growth and an advocacy for philosophy and the humanities, and a determination to make strong faculty appointments and to provide the intellectual space for them to do high-quality work. At Whitman College, for example, during Stuhr's leadership the philosophy department doubled in size and added the first women and first African-American philosophers in the institution's history. At the University of Oregon, the Humanities Center grew rapidly (fueled by major private fundraising) and engaged a highly diverse group of scholars on campus and intellectual leaders across the state. During his headship at Penn State, the department hired a large group of philosophers including John Sallis (now at Boston College), John Russon (now at the University of Guelph), Richard A. Lee, Jr. (now at DePaul University), Shannon Sullivan (now at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte), Dennis J. Schmidt (now at Western Sydney University), and Nancy Tuana and Vincent Colapietro. And, at Emory, under Stuhr's watch overhauls of both the undergraduate and graduate programs greatly increased diversity and pluralistic approaches to philosophy, as did appointments of new faculty including John T. Lysaker, Marta Jimenez, Melvin Rogers (now at Brown University), Susan M. Bredlau, Dilek Huseyinzadegan, and George Dewey Yancy.
