Draft:Dena Shottenkirk

Dena Shottenkirk is an American moral and political philosopher, artist, and founder of the art and public philosophy nonprofit talkPOPc, whose work centers on the intersection of epistemology, perception, and aesthetics. She is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

Education
Shottenkirk has a BA in philosophy and art from the University of Kansas (1977) and an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts of Rutgers University (1981). Shottenkirk received her doctorate in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2005.

Career
Shottenkirk was a staff art critic for Artforum and Art in America magazines, and an artist represented by Postmaster Gallery (NYC). She has received numerous awards, including a Fulbright Scholar fellowship, published three books on philosophy and has had numerous exhibitions of her artwork.

Research areas
Shottenkirk's philosophical research focuses on the ways epistemology dovetails with aesthetics, with particular concern regarding issues of perception. Emphasizing the role of gist perception (the first approximate 300ms.) Shottenkirk has developed a theory that explains how the initial gist perception influences both the objective content that we perceive as well as our subjective assessment. In this, she has joined recent research in philosophy that has shown a willingness to diverge from the traditional emphasis on beauty in aesthetics, and to instead focus on the function of art in the formation of social beliefs.

As author

 * Art as Cognition - Framing the Aesthetic Experience as a Conversation, Springer, forthcoming 2024
 * Cover up the Dirty Parts!: Funding, Fighting, and the First Amendment, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1443830171
 * Nominalism and Its Aftermath: The Philosophy of Nelson Goodman, Springer, 2009, ISBN 978-9048182237