Biography

Karen Hanson, Ph.D.
IU Bloomington Provost and Executive Vice President

Karen Hanson, Ph.D.
Bloomington Provost and Executive Vice President
Rudy Professor of Philosophy

Karen Hanson was named Provost of the Bloomington campus and Executive Vice President of Indiana University on July 5, 2007. Prior to being appointed Provost, she served as dean of the Hutton Honors College from 2002 to 2007 and chaired the Department of Philosophy from 1997 to 2002. A faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at IU since 1976, Professor Hanson is also an adjunct faculty member of Comparative Literature, American Studies, and Gender Studies. She has also won numerous campus and all-university teaching awards, along with a Lilly Fellowship and a number of research grants.

Karen Hanson received a B.A., summa cum laude, in Philosophy and Mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1970. She received her Ph.D., and A.M., in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1980.

Karen Hanson's principal research interests are in the philosophy of mind, ethics, aesthetics, and American philosophy. She's published many articles and essays in these areas and is the author of The Self Imagined: Philosophical Reflections on the Social Character of Pysche and a co-editor of Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory.

Hanson has twice been elected to the Executive Committee of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA) and to the APA National Board of Officers. She served as Chair of the Board of the APA in 2004-2005. From 1993 to 1997, she served as the APA Delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and as a member of the ACLS Executive Committee.

Hanson has been an associate editor of the Journal of Social Philosophy, a member of the editorial board of American Philosophical Quarterly, and a Trustee for the American Society for Aesthetics. Her current editorial board memberships include Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews and Cognitio, and she is an Officer of the Board of the John Dewey Foundation and a member of both the advisory and the editorial boards of the Peirce Edition Project.