Troy Jollimore on Tom Thomson in Purgatory

Troy Jollimore is an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico, and author of the poetry collection, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. Jollimore studied in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1999. His dissertation, on the relation between normative theories of ethics and the requirements of friendship, was advised by Harry Frankfurt and Sarah Buss and was selected by Robert Nozick for Garland Publishing’s Studies in Ethics series. His philosophical articles have appeared in journals including Canadian Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly and Philosophy and Literature. Prior to Princeton, he was an undergraduate at the University of King’s College and in the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Before joining the faculty at CSU Chico he taught at Georgetown University and the University of California, Davis. He has published poetry in journals including Exile Quarterly, PRISM International, MARGIE, and Ploughshares. His first book of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, was selected by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins for the 2005 Robert E. Lee & Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award, and is the winner of the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Professor Jollimore’s areas of research interest include meta-ethics, normative ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of literature and film. He has taught courses on all of these topics, as well as on epistemology, ancient philosophy, the history of modern philosophy, and biomedical ethics. His current research concerns various topics in ethical philosophy, many having to do with the concepts of desert and loyalty and their relations to various ethical reasons and obligations, particularly in the context of personal relationships. In addition to serving as Director of the Humanities Center at CSU Chico, Professor Jollimore has also served on the Advisory Board of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics (CAPE), as a faculty advisor for Phi Sigma Tau, the Philosophy Honors Society at CSU Chico, and as Coordinator for Theme S (Wealth, Power & Inequality) in the General Education Upper Division Themes Program. He also writes frequently for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, and is an occasional contributor to the Weblog PEA SOUP.