Amy Allen is the Head of the Department of Philosophy at Penn State University. She is a professor of philosophy and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies specializing in 20th century Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and Social and Political Theory. She completed her PhD in philosophy at Northwestern University. She spent 1996-1997 as a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Grinnell College and 1997-1999 as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College, before joining the permanent faculty. In 2004, she was promoted to associate professor and received a cross-appointment in the women’s and gender studies department. She spent a term abroad as visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 2006, before returning to Dartmouth and chairing the philosophy department for six years from 2006 to 2012.
Her publications include “Emancipation without Utopia: Subjection, Modernity, and the Normative Claims of Feminist Theory,” The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, and “The Historical A Priori in Husserl and Foucault”. She has sat on the executive committee of the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association, and has been an executive co-director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, a co-editor-in-chief of Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, and editor of the series New Directions in Critical Theory published by Columbia University Press.