Alumni News

If you received a B.A. or an M.A. in philosophy from LSU, please take a moment to let us know what you are doing now. Remind us what degree you received and when you graduated, and we'll keep your information updated here!

  • Stanley Baronett (MA 1990) was until recently teaching philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Baronett wrote Logic: The Basics (Prentice Hall, 2007).

  • David H. Calhoun (BA 1981) went on to earn a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University (1989) and is now Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University (Spokane, WA), where he has taught since 1989. His areas of teaching, research, and writing include history of ancient Greek philosophy, philosophy and film, philosophical anthropology, and Christianity and science. He founded and directs the Gonzaga Socratic Club, which addresses Christian worldview issues from a broadly philosophical point of view. He remembers with gratitude the help and support he received from LSU Philosophy faculty, especially Ed Henderson and Gregory Schufreider.

  • Timothy Childers (BA 1987; MA 1989) holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the prestigious London School of Economics in addition to a Master's and a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy from Louisiana State University. Currently, Dr. Childers teaches political philosophy, logic, and ethics in the Department of International Relations and Economics at the University of New York in Prague. He also has a position as researcher in the Department of Logic at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Dr. Childers joined UNYP in 2002, and since then he has been a very active member of the academic community, serving on the Academic Board from 2008-2009 and contributing to the organization of the Debating Workshops of UNYP’s Debating Society. Among his research interests are philosophy of science and probability. He has published over a dozen articles in scholarly journals and is currently working on a book called Philosophy and Probability: an Introduction.

  • Ian Cruise (B.A., 2011), immediately after graduating from LSU, completed a Master's degree in Philosophy and Public Policy at the London School of Economics.  Afterward, he applied to Ph.D. programs and was accepted at the University of Virginia, Washington University in St. Louis, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He accepted Chapel Hill's offer and will be enrolling in the fall of 2014. He has expressed his gratitude for the help and guidance that he received from Professors Ed Song (no longer at LSU), Husain Sarkar, and Jeff Roland.  

  • Mehmet Elgin (MA 1996) is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Mugla University in Turkey. He went to the University of Wisconsin, where he wrote his dissertation under Elliot Sober, ex-President of the American Philosophical Association. Elgin was in Hannover, Germany at the Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science. The Center invited him to give a talk there on biological laws, in part because of his paper, “There May be Strict Empirical Laws in Biology, After All,” which appeared in January 2006 in Biology and Philosophy, the premier journal in the field. The Center then offered him a visiting fellowship for the 2007 spring term. The Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh – one of the finest Departments in philosophy of science in the world – offered Mehmet a visiting fellowship for the 2007-2008 academic year.

  • Andrew Johnson (MA 2010) successfully completed his MA in Philosophy in 2010. Since then he has held an Adjunct teaching position at Husson College in Maine, an English Professor position at Guangxi University in Nanning, China, and a Philosophy Professor position at Beijing Huijia International School in Beijing, China. He has had two papers published that were completed for graduate classes at LSU (one in both English and Chinese), and his Master's thesis for the Philosophy Department was published. He recently applied to PhD programs and received several offers. Starting in 2013 he will be a Doctoral Fellow in Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

  • Ashley Knox (MA 2010) successfully completed her M.A. thesis, “A Heideggerian Route Through Kuhnian Revolution,” in Spring 2010. She then went to Greater New York City Area to work as a fashion, marketing, and publishing professional.

  • Ross Romero (MA 1997) is now an assistant professor of philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. In Spring 2016, he published a book, Without the Least Tremor: The Sacrifice of Socrates in Plato's Phaedo, with SUNY Press.

  • Nicholas Schroeder (MA 2011) successfully completed his M.A. thesis, “Moral Dilemmas in Contemporary Virtue Ethics,” in Spring 2011. This dealt with the work of Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Terrance McConnell.  Schroeder was offered graduate teaching assistantships from the University of Kansas and the University of Arkansas and was also accepted at the University of Tennessee. He accepted the offer from Kansas.

  • Casey Spinks (BA 2016, MA 2017) has contributed a chapter to the book "Taking Kirkegaard Personally" with Mercer University Press and contributed articles to the peer-review journals 'Philosophy and Theology' and 'Perspectives in Religious Studies.' Casey also has an article forthcoming in the 'International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.' Casey is currently a second-year Ph.D. student in theology at Baylor University's Department of Religion (2020). 
  • John Strom (MA 1987) went to the University of Maryland. With Lindley Darden he published an essay review entitled “Is Artificial Intelligence a Degenerating Program: A Review of Hubert Dreyfus’ What Computers Still Can’t Do,” in Artificial Intelligence 80 (1996):151-170.

  • April Weintritt was offered teaching assistantships in 2010 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Indiana University, and University of Virginia at Arlington. She is currently a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures.

  • Frank Worrell (BA 2005; MA 2007) won the Honors Thesis award with his thesis “Purposive Action: The Centrality of Teleology in Kant’s Formula of Universal Law of Nature.” Worrell was offered teaching assistantships from Texas A & M, the University of Tennessee, and Tulane University. He was also wait-listed at the University of Minnesota, the University of Florida, Washington University, and Rice University. Eventually he went to Tulane University, where he is finishing a dissertation in philosophy. He taught philosophy at LSU in the Spring 2012 term.