About Kristin Boyce

Starkville, Mississippi

Kristin Boyce (CBA ’20) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Fellow in the Shackouls Honors College at Mississippi State University. She received a doctorate in Philosophy from The University of Chicago in 2010. Her work has appeared in The Midwest Series in Philosophy, The Journal of Philosophical Research, The Henry James Review, Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature, The Palgrave Handbook of Film and Motion Pictures, and the edited collections, Wittgenstein and Literary Modernism and Thinking Through Dance. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including an ACLS New Faculty Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship from Stanford University, and a Josephine De Karmán Dissertation Fellowship. She is the 2019 Mississippi Humanities Council MSU Humanities Teacher of the Year.

Diotima at the Ballet: Reinventing Modernism in Philosophy and the Arts

At CBA, Boyce developed a manuscript organized around a concept of “conversation” that is first articulated by Diotima, one of the only female figures in Plato’s dialogues. In The Symposium, Diotima describes conversation not (as contemporary philosophers often think of it) as a vehicle for conveying information but instead as a medium for forming and transforming the soul of a citizen. The book argues that although contemporary philosophy and the arts find themselves in radically transformed circumstances, they should, and sometimes do, continue to answer to this time-honored Socratic aspiration and that the choreography of Alexei Ratmansky provides the powerful example of how this can be done.

Gallery

Kristin Boyce.

Kristin Boyce. Photo by Megan Bean / © Mississippi State University

Kristin Boyce.