VINCENT ALTAMORE, who drew our cover picture of Larry David, has been a freelance illustrator for over twenty-five years, and delights in stretching the features of the rich and famous. You can find more of his work on his blog, <vincentaltamore.blogspot.com>. He lives by the rule, Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum, and resides in Morris Plains, New Jersey (not that that’s anything to be proud of).
ROBERT R. CLEWIS is author of The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (2009) and teaches at Gwynedd-Mercy College in Pennsylvania. He has taken Curb Your Enthusiasm’s advice to heart and has his enthusiasm duly curbed. In fact, he doesn’t care about anything anymore. Not even the show.
TAINE DUNCAN is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Arkansas. She teaches courses on race, class, and gender, and fancies herself to be a little bit of the ever-optimistic bleeding heart that is Cheryl. She has a lithograph of Larry David hanging in her dining room to look each visitor squarely in the eye.
ROBERT FARROW, occasionally described as ‘245 pounds of twisted steel and drop-your-bony-butt-to-the-curb appeal’, is a philosopher and technologist in the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University. Rob holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Essex and can be found online as philosopher1978. He hates himself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish.
CHAD FLANDERS is an assistant professor of law at Saint Louis University, where he teaches criminal and constitutional law. He’s the author of articles and essays on punishment, election law, and the philosophy of Adam Smith. Both David and Chad received their PhD’s at the University of Chicago. Neither have sandwiches named after them.
NATALIE FLETCHER has the delectable pleasure of teaching philosophy to teenagers at John Abbott College in Montreal. She’s the director of Brila Youth Projects (www.brila.org), a Philosophy-for-Children (P4C) initiative that promotes critical thinking and social responsibility through creative inquiry workshops and digital magazine production. You couldn’t pay her enough to try “The Larry David Sandwich”—talk about a ginormous salad-bowl of wrong!—but she’s all for binging on delicious sponges . . . especially when they double as crash pads.
ANDREA LEHN is a freshman in the Honors Program studying Biomedical Engineering and Chemistry at The George Washington University. What does Curb Your Enthusiasm have to do with either of these subjects? Well, . . . nothing. Andrea’s convinced that she’ll be able to complete the problem sets she put off while writing the glossary for this book after she puts the finishing touches on her time machine. Her mother is happy that she’s paying for $4 espresso beverages instead of funding Andrea’s time machine, which will take priority . . . someday. Andrea’s liver violently opposes, but once that time machine is complete, she will travel back to kick the habit—if there’s time after convincing Larry and Jeff to invest in her time machine instead of that silly car periscope.
ANNA MUDDE is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of philosophy at Campion College (University of Regina) on the Canadian prairies. If you’ve never schlepped to Saskatchewan, she’s here to tell you: it’s a schlep. She specializes in epistemology, ontology, feminist philosophy, philosophy of technology, and Simone de Beauvoir. Her newest project is about living as experimentation.
SIMON MUSSELL studied at the University of Sussex and works on twentieth-century social and political theory, aesthetics and cultural studies. He currently idles in the seaside town of Brighton, England. As a perpetually poor student, Simon would routinely abuse his sampling privileges in order to eat well. Today, he vociferously pops bubble-wrap and campaigns for the egalitarian respect of wood. His next project, ‘The Five-Inch Bunch Up and its Discontents’, will warn colleagues of the risks involved in wearing loose-fitting corduroy pants while teaching. A significant amount of his time is dedicated to the avoidance of unwanted stop and chats, truly a task without end.
SEAN PETRANOVICH is a PhD student in philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, and completed his BA and MA in philosophy at the University of New Mexico. Petranovich is often guilty of humming parts of the Curb Your Enthusiasm soundtrack to supplement ordinary moments in his day, and has difficulties restraining himself from calling people “Schmohawks” while driving. While he was initially only drawn to Curb as a means for picking up golf tips, Petranovich was hooked by the show’s messages of kindness and moral purity.
ROBERT PIERCEY is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Campion College in Regina, Saskatchewan. He works on contemporary European philosophy and is the author of two books: The Crisis in Continental Philosophy and The Uses of the Past From Heidegger to Rorty. Rob enjoys sponge cake, milk and coffee mixed together, and wine that tastes a little like a tree.
MARK RALKOWSKI is an assistant professor of Philosophy and Honors at The George Washington University. He is the author of Heidegger’s Platonism and a variety of articles on topics in the history of philosophy. Ralkowski respects Jesus and the Buddha, but what he’d really like to know, and what he’d really like people to ask before they make decisions, is What would Larry do? No doubt you’re dubious, but who knows? It might just make you and the rest of us ebullient and hammock-like, gently swaying in the wind.
JAMES ROCHA is an assistant professor of Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University. He specializes in Kant, race, feminism, and applied ethics. One key part of his job is teaching students to never follow the unwritten rules of society without question such as the unwritten rule that you can’t take flowers from a roadside memorial even if you need them to placate your wife. Wait, maybe that’s a pretty, pretty, pretty good rule. Well, question even that one, and then decide based on what’s most rational. That’s the Kantian way—and the Larry David way.
JAMES RODWELL teaches in the School of Art History and Philosophy at the University of Essex. Amongst other things, he works on Kierkegaard and post-Kantian philosophy of religion. All his sins are sins of omission.
DAVID SVOLBA will frequently call Chad Flanders while waiting for the doctor, using the doctor’s phone. Chad is nonplussed by this. David is a philosophical journeyman, having taught philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, at the Jesuit University in Krakow, Poland, and most recently at Fitchburg State University, where he has accepted a tenure-track job teaching philosophy. He has written on the work of Harry Frankfurt and on The Big Lebowski.
JOSEPH WESTFALL steals forks from restaurants. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston-Downtown, and the author of The Kierkegaardian Author: Authorship and Performance in Kierkegaard’s Literary and Dramatic Criticism (2007), in addition to numerous articles on issues of authorship, identity, irony, and the arts in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy. He is also nothing like Joseph Westfall.
BEKKA WILLIAMS is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she’s completing a dissertation exploring the relationship between group obligations and individual obligations. She works for the Institutional Review Board at her university, where she tries to help make sure that medical researchers follow the rules. And most semesters, Bekka also teaches undergraduate philosophy—primarily Ethics classes, in which she tries to convince her students that there really is something to “all this morality stuff.” Bekka finds that teaching undergraduates involves the perfect amount of social interaction: While she doesn’t like talking to people she knows, students she has no problem with.
KEVIN ZANELOTTI is an assistant professor of philosophy at McKendree University. His research focuses on nineteenth-century German philosophy, applied ethics, and the pedagogy of philosophy. He has published articles on Spinoza, Fichte, and strategies for teaching philosophy to undergraduates. As the sole member of a one-person philosophy department, his teaching focuses on, well, everything. As a balding person, he shares Larry David’s disdain for the arrogance of the full-haired majority and contempt for self-hating baldies everywhere.