Linda Martín Alcoff

Linda Martín Alcoff (born July 25, 1955) is a Panamanian American philosopher and professor of philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York. Alcoff specializes in social epistemology, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, decolonial theory and continental philosophy, especially the work of Michel Foucault. She has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, The Future of Whiteness (2015), and Rape and Resistance (2018). Her public philosophy writing has been published in The Guardian and The New York Times.

Alcoff has called for greater inclusion of historically underrepresented groups in philosophy. She notes that philosophers from these groups have created new fields of inquiry, including feminist philosophy, critical race theory, Latino philosophy, and LGBTQ philosophy. From 2012 to 2013, she served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. In February 2018 she was appointed president of the board of directors of Hypatia, Inc., the non-profit corporation that owns the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia.

Early life and education Alcoff was born in Panama, Her father became a professor of history at the Universidad de Panama. When her parents separated, Alcoff moved with her mother and sister to Florida when she was three. In 1980 she earned a BA with honors in philosophy from Georgia State University and in 1983 an MA, also in philosophy. She did her doctoral work at Brown University, completing her dissertation under the direction of Ernest Sosa, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Schmitt and receiving her PhD in 1987.

Alcoff has long advocated for diversifying the discipline of philosophy. To help address these issues, with Paul Taylor and William Wilkerson, she started the "Pluralist's Guide to Philosophy". From 2010 to 2013 Alcoff was joint editor-in-chief, with Ann Cudd, of the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia. She served on its board of associate editors during the Hypatia transracialism controversy in 2017. The journal's management subsequently established a task force to resolve the journal's governance issues; Alcoff became president of the board of directors of Hypatia, Inc., in February 2018.

Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self attempted to offer a unified account of social identity by bridging her previous work in epistemology, metaphysics, and the politics of ethnicity, race, and gender. In it, Alcoff suggested that geographic location has significant implications for social identity above and beyond those conveyed by other contributors to identity (although she does not view such implications as deterministic).

Awards and recognitions Alcoff has received several honors and awards, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo in September 2011, and the Caribbean Philosophical Association's Frantz Fanon Prize for 2009 for her book Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self. She was recognized as a Distinguished Woman in Philosophy by the Society for Women in Philosophy in 2005, and she held the Meredith Professorship for Excellence in Teaching at Syracuse University from 1995 to 1998.

Selected works

Alcoff, Linda Martín (2006). Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self. Oxford University Press.