Stony Brook Alumna Wins Prestigious Gustave O. Arlt Award

STONY BROOK , NY - Dr. Bonnie Mann, Stony Brook Universty alumna from the Philosophy department has been designated as the recipient of the 2007 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities in the field of the Linguistics and Philosophy. The award is in recognition of Dr. Mann's book, Women's Liberation and the Sublime, Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford University Press, 2006).

First presented in 1972, the Gustave O. Arlt Award was named in honor of the first president of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS). It is awarded annually by CGS to a young scholar teaching in the humanities at an American university who has earned the doctorate within the past seven years and who has published a book that represents an outstanding contribution to scholarship in the humanities.

The award consists of a $1,000 stipend, a certificate, and travel expenses to attend the 47th Annual Meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) in Seattle where the Award was presented to Mann. Nominations are made by CGS member institutions and are reviewed by a panel of scholars in the field of competition, which rotates annually among literature, history, linguisitics, foreign languages, philosophy, archaeology, and musicology.

Dr. Mann earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stony Brook University in 2002 and went on to teach at the University of Oregon in 2003. In 2006 she published the award winning book, which the Arlt Award Committee unanimously agreed clearly met the criteria for scholarly excellence.

Her book is described as " a passionate report on the state of feminist thinking and practice after the linguistic turn." One competition reviewer noted Professor Mann's "ability to sort out arguments in a way that allows readers to feel that they are participating in a dialogue, not merely reading about dialogues engaged by others." A detailed summary of the book is available from the publisher at: www.oup.com/us/.

Mann says her writing is "often directed at sorting through, deploying and thinking critically about what we call "postmodern feminism" or "poststructuralist feminism." It is informed by two decades of working as an activist in the anti-war and violence against women movements. As a result of her work, she became concerned with the "liberatory impulse in feminist philosophy and how it fares in poststructuralist thought."

Dr. Mann remains as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon and is in the process of founding the Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology. Her current research engages the work of Simone de Beauvoir; issues of war, gender and aesthetics; the relation between gender as identity and experience and a broader politics of gender; and the relation and dispute between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. She lives in Eugene, Oregon with her partner and four daughters.

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The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) is an organization of 500 institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada engaged in graduate education, research and the preparation of candidates for advanced degrees. CGS member institutions award more than 90% of the doctoral degrees and over 75% of the master's degrees in the U.S. The organization's mission is to improve and advance graduate education, which it accomplishes through advocacy in the federal policy arena, research, and the development and dissemination of best practices.