Ted Toadvine, Ph.D.

Bio

I grew up on a family farm in Hebron, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In addition to farming, my father was the proprietor of Toadvine’s Taxidermy Shop. My sister April is a professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Southern University in Baton Rouge, and my sister Holly is Regional Chief of the Southeast Region of the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System.

I earned my BA in Philosophy at Salisbury University in 1990 under the mentorship of Jerome Miller. After a year of graduate study at Temple University, I completed my M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (1996) in Philosophy at the University of Memphis under the direction of Leonard Lawlor with a dissertation on Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intersubjectivity. In 1996-1997, I was William F. Dietrich Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University under the supervision of Lester Embree. Subsequently, I taught philosophy at Kalamazoo College as a Visiting Professor and at Emporia State University in Kansas, where I was Chair of Social Sciences in 2002-2003.

I moved to the University of Oregon in 2003 for a joint position in Environmental Studies and Philosophy. At Oregon, I held the positions of Wayne Morse Resident Scholar in Law & Politics (2009-2010), Robert F. and Evelyn Nelson Wulf Professor in the Humanities (2009-2010), and Department Head of Philosophy (2011-2014). I was Visiting Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College in 2010-2011 and Research Associate in Environmental Studies there in 2015-2016. I was awarded the University of Oregon Fund for Faculty Excellence Award in 2012, a university-wide award of $20,000 that recognizes recipients for their standing and impact within their respective fields or disciplines, their contributions to program and institutional quality at the University of Oregon, and their academic leadership. I was promoted to Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy in 2015.

In 2017, I joined Penn State as Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and Associate Professor of Philosophy. In Spring 2018, I was Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University (UK). I was promoted to Professor of Philosophy at Penn State in 2024.

Research

Over the last three decades, my research has focused on the intersection of two themes. First, I have investigated foundational problems in the philosophy of nature, including ethics, aesthetics, ontology, and epistemology. I have been particularly interested in the philosophical assumptions that guide our understanding of contemporary environmental challenges, including the cultural and historical framing of environmental problems and their solutions. Second, I have explored the contribution of the philosophical methods of phenomenology and deconstruction to clarifying the human relationship to nature, including our embodiment, our relationship with non-human animals, and the experiential foundations of scientific knowledge. My research is informed by the history of philosophy and engages the emerging interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities.

In 2003, I introduced “ecophenomenology” as an approach to environmental theory grounded on the methods of phenomenology, and this is now recognized as an established field of research across the environmental humanities with proponents in literary ecocriticism, the arts, architecture, and critical animal studies, as well as philosophy.

My first monograph, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (2009), developed the theoretical basis for ecophenomenology through a study of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose insights continue to inform my thinking. Over the last decade, I have published journal articles and book chapters that extend the methods of ecophenomenology and develop original investigations in the philosophy of nature, including studies of the human-animal relation, biodiversity, natural temporality, and environmental apocalypticism. These studies are linked by their concern with the relationship between the human experience of time and deep time at geological and evolutionary scales, which scholars have identified as a central challenge of the so-called Anthropocene.

The problem of bridging vastly incongruous scales of time is made thematic in my latest monograph, The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology (2024), where I argue for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously our entanglement in temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and historical registers. I contend that our obsession with the world’s precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects our responsibilities for the past and present in favor of managing the future. This misleads sustainability efforts and diminishes our encounters with the world and with human and nonhuman others.

Teaching and Mentoring

I have more than twenty-five years of full-time teaching experience and love teaching at all levels. My courses emphasize the development of skills of critical reading, writing, reflection, and dialogue, and they engage with diverse perspectives often underrepresented in philosophy courses, including those of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and non-Western cultures. In addition to my formal teaching, I have two decades of experience training and mentoring graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, many of whom now occupy tenured and tenure-track academic positions. For more details about my courses, see my Teaching page.

Leadership

I have earned a national reputation for my professional and organizational leadership in Continental and environmental philosophy, and I have sought out opportunities to support the work of junior scholars, especially through my editorial and organizational positions. I have also served extensively as an external reviewer of manuscripts, grants, academic programs, and faculty tenure and promotions.

Editorial Positions

Professional Boards and Offices