Department of PhilosophyBackground|I am an interdisciplinary PhD student, Fontaine Fellow, and a proud McNair scholar. I did my B.A at CU Boulder in an Independently Structured major (or a distributed studies track) where I pulled from neuroscience/psych, astrophysics, and philosophy to pursue questions in existentialism given our contemporary advancements in STEAM. The questions I found particularly interesting in my undergrad had to do with agency , identity, and how we break down "the individual". I defended my honors thesis in the Spring of 2021, and earned latin honors. My thesis was titled:“New Age” Existentialism:Understanding the Modern Turbulence of the new challenges to the Idea of the ‘Individual’ as framed within Power,Death, and Freedom as the basis of ‘Free Will’ and their ties to the newly bolstered fields of Neuroscience, Astrophysics, and PhilosophyI set the groundwork for writing my undergrad thesis with grant funded qualitative research I did in Barranquilla, Colombia , which helped me establish how I would approach breaking down "free will" into primary categories I could interrogate through my fields of study.
Gwendalynn Roebke
they/them/theirs
B.A Distributed Studies (Astrophysics, Neuroscience, and Philosophy) | Magna Cum Laude| University of Colorado Boulder
Research Interests
Research Interests|My primary research fields of interests are Philosophy of Action, Philosophy of Mind, and Anti-colonial Philosophy. The kinds of questions I am now pursuing regard the culpability/blameworthiness of marginalized groups in their marginalization given historical trauma, learned helplessness behavior, and how colonization has influenced how we construct "whole" persons and personhood . This brings me to the interplay between mind, identity, agency and narrativity as the underpinnings of what makes "whole" persons "coherent". I am particularly interested in the coherence of groups/persons who have been and continue to be subjected to colonization. My other interests involve Latin American Philosophy, Indigenous Philosophy, and Crtical Black Studies.I am affiliated with the Middle Eastern Center (MEC) at Penn, sit on the graduate board for the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLALS) , and am an active member of the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA). Some of my current research was supported through the "Dispossessions in the Americas” Penn-Mellon Just Futures grant. On this grant project, I acted as a graduate RA , and investigated the philosophical quandaries turned bodily harms that arise in contexts of dispossession, coloniality, and alienation.
