Kirsten Jacobson
Courses I Teach
In the spring of 2024, I taught PHI 104: Existentialism and Literature and PHI 262: Philosophy of Art.
Other courses I teach include: PHI 212: Hegel and 19th Century Philosophy, PHI 214: 20th Century Continental Philosophy, PHI 317: Existentialism and Phenomenology, and PPHI 420: Topics in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, PHI 432: Advanced Topics in the Philosophy of Art.
My Focus
I specialize in 19th and 20th century Continental philosophy and the philosophy of art. My research interests include the study of spatiality and the interpersonal significance of space, the nature of home and dwelling, and more generally, the philosophical significance and status of the phenomenological method. My published work has focused significantly on using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to conduct novel analyses of psychological and physiological illnesses ranging from spatial neglect to agoraphobia, and more generally to consider issues of “existential health.”
Professional Preparation
I received my PhD from Penn State University in 2006, and began teaching at the University of Maine that same fall. During my career, I have published close to 25 articles and made over 70 presentations—many at the national and international levels. My most recent work has focused on aging and dying. I also co-edited (along with John Russon) Perception and its Development in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology (University of Toronto Press, 2017). In 2009, I co-created a philosophy outreach program called Philosophy Across the Ages, which brings together undergraduate philosophy students with local high school students (and sometimes retirement community members) for seminar-style discussions of accessible and exciting philosophical texts. In 2015, I received the University of Maine’s top two awards for teaching and advising—the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Outstanding Faculty in Teaching and Advising Award and the Presidential Outstanding Teaching Award.
See More about Kirsten here: Academia.edu profile
Reflections from Kirsten:
I’m driven by questions of how we connect through language as well as how language is deeply embedded in our explicit or implicit awareness of our vulnerability and, ultimately, our mortality. Rainer Maria Rilke once reflected: “Our greatest task is this: to find a written language which can withstand our tears and re-create before us—clear, pure, precise—the beautiful goodbyes of those who sailed the seas.” Take a moment to imagine a sailor’s parting words to family, friends, a child, a lover; perhaps you’ll feel a hint of the force of a goodbye that can know no secure promise of homecoming, a goodbye that juxtaposes the certainty of the now with how one has come to this present with the unfathomability of what is to come. What is Rilke suggesting in declaring our ultimate task to be the writing of this goodbye? If this is our ultimate task, we cannot be talking about something mattering only to sailors. It’s this kind of living-dying practice that moves me as a person, a thinker, and someone committed education. I’m also informed by Simone de Beauvoir’s related recognition in The Ethics of Ambiguity that “the drama of original choice is that it goes on moment by moment for an entire lifetime.” Even if I know what it means to write a goodbye that speaks to life, it’s something I’d need to work on doing every day anew. I think this is what brings me to the field of philosophy. It’s definitely what makes me shake up my reading and teaching semester after semester (cf. Anne Carson’s meaning-massaging description of shaking up Stesichorus’s fragments in Autobiography of Red). In addition to studies of our relationships to dying and aging, my philosophical interests also focus on phenomenological considerations of spatiality and health, including the nature of home and dwelling, “disturbed” spatial experiences, space and political life, and the spatial roots of memory and identity. I’ll end by cueing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves—a novel that weaves these interest threads together, and that has spoken to me differently every decade since I first read it some thirty to forty years ago. I love relationships with books that grow like those with our significant others.
