Biografia
Kelly Ann Oliver (born July 28, 1958) is an American philosopher specializing in feminism, political philosophy and ethics. She is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She is also a founder of the feminist philosophy journal philoSOPHIA. Oliver is the author of 16 scholarly books, 12 edited volumes, and scores of scholarly articles. Her books include Response Ethics (2019), Carceral Humanitarianism: The Logic of Refugee Detention (2017), Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape (2016), and Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (2015) and her most recognized work, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001). She is also a novelist and the author of three mystery series: The Jessica James Mysteries, The Pet Detective Mysteries, and The Fiona Figg Mysteries. == Education and career == Oliver was raised in Montana, Idaho, and Spokane, Washington, the oldest of four children (three girls and a boy). Her father was a lumberjack and engineer. On both sides of the family, her ancestors were among the first to settle in Northern Idaho. She received her BA in philosophy and communications from Gonzaga University in 1979 and her PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University in 1987. Before moving to Vanderbilt in 2005, she taught in the philosophy departments of West Virginia University, the University of Texas at Austin and SUNY Stony Brook. == Selected works == === Earth and World (2015) === In Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (Columbia University Press, 2015), Oliver explores the reactions to the first pictures of Earth, including Earthrise and The Blue Marble, taken during the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Examining the rhetoric surrounding these photographs, she identifies a tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that sets the tone for this book. Starting with Immanuel Kant, Oliver follows a path of thinking our relations to each other through our relation to the Earth, from Kant's politics based on the fact that we share the limited surface of the Earth, through Hannah Arendt's and Martin Heidegger's warnings that by leaving the surface of the Earth, we endanger not only politics but also our very being as human beings, to Jacques Derrida's last meditations on the singular world of each human being. The guiding question that motivates Oliver's book is: How can we share the Earth with those with whom we do not even share a world? === Technologies of Life and Death (2013) === In Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment (Fordham 2013), Oliver analyzes the extremes of birth and death insofar as they are mediated by technologies of life and death. First, with an eye to reproductive technologies, Oliver considers how the terms of debates over genetic engineering and cloning change if we challenge the assumption of liberal individualism at their heart. In this book, she shows how the very terms
