Patricia J. Mills

Courses Developed and Taught

University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Department of Political Science

Undergraduate Courses:

Friendship and Political Life

Introduction to Political Theory

Ancient Political Theory

Critical Theory/Political Theory

Modern Political Thought

Contemporary Political Theory

Feminist Theory and Politics (cross-listed with the Women’s Studies Program)

Autobiography and Feminist Politics

Women and the Power of Words

Radical Democracy

Three Thinkers I Think You Should Know: Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt

Philosophy for Children (co-taught with a colleague from Mount Holyoke College)

Graduate Seminars:

Antigone: Tragedy and Ethico-Political Consciousness

The Enigma of Socrates: From Plato to Postmodernism

Ancient Political Theory

Hegel: Then and Now

Speculative Thinking/Dialectical Thinking

Critical Theory

Political Theory and Modernity

Deconstruction and Politics

Women, Art, and Politics

The Dialectical Tradition from Hegel to Adorno

Nietzsche

Aesthetics and Politics

Critical Theory: Adorno and Derrida

Contemporary Feminist Critical Theory

Feminist Theory and Politics

University of Toronto, Department of Philosophy

Undergraduate courses:

Introduction to Philosophy

Political Philosophy

Ethics

The Art of Thinking

Existentialism

Nineteenth Century Philosophy

Critical Theory

Feminist Issues in Philosophy (cross-listed with the Women’s Studies Program)

Nietzsche Seminar

Introduction to Women’s Studies (co-taught with six other faculty members)

Professional Activities

Participant, International Conference on Methodological Problems of Biographical Research, “Holocaust Survivors: Telling Their Stories,” University of Kassel, Germany, May 2001.
The goal of this conference was to find a way to help survivors of Hitler’s Germany (many of whom had been ‘hidden children’) tell their stories. Known as ‘the lucky ones,’ the trauma of their lives under Hitler did not disappear when they were liberated. The question for this conference was how we could ‘witness’ for those survivors who were unable to speak for themselves, who could not tell their own stories in a coherent way. One of the participants developed guidelines for just such a project. That is, learning how to tell the stories of survivors with sympathy and empathy in such a way that they never became merely the ‘objects’ of study.

Participant in the Ninth International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies, University of Toronto.

Participant in the founding of the journal Feminist Ethics, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec.

Member of a Symposium on “Ethnicity in a Technological Age,” Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario.

last updated 30 December 2021