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Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Carolyn Dicey Jennings

I am an empirically-informed philosopher with training in psychology and neuroscience. My primary topic of research is attention. Driving my research is the question of how we are able to direct our minds through attention and what impact this has on other functions of the mind. This question has deep philosophical roots, with connections to the mind-body problem and the problem of free will, while also benefitting from recent research in the sciences. In my career so far I have published 2 monographs (The Attending Mind and Attention and Mental Control, both with Cambridge University Press), a co-edited volume (Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction, with Routledge), and a number of articles, chapters, and other publications.

I also have a secondary research project gathering and analyzing data on the philosophy profession (Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis), which has supported a large number of graduate and undergraduate researchers through grants and has already had considerable influence on the field. Going forward I plan to apply my work to the topics of consciousness and social cognition, which is already underway.

Professor Carolyn Dicey Jennings