Academic

Matthew Strohl’s academic page

Self-promotion has always been my least favorite part of academia, but here we are. I’ll try to get this in better shape at some point, but here’s my slightly out of date CV.

And I’ve finally uploaded most of my work to Philpapers: https://philpapers.org/s/Matthew%20Strohl

And here’s a brief bio and description of what I’m working on nowadays:

I finished my Ph.D at Princeton University in 2008 and took a tenure track job at the University of Montana in Missoula, where I still work today.  I have a longstanding interest in Ancient Greek theories of pleasure, which I believe are still stunningly vital and illuminating. My dissertation was about Aristotle’s theory of pleasure and I have since published two papers on the subject (archived on Philpapers). In the years since I finished grad school, I have migrated into Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. I really enjoy working in this area and I find it very liberating to do more exploratory systematic work.

I have a book coming out, Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies. It’s a discussion of a number of core issues in the philosophy of art through the lens of bad movie love. It’s about 50% film criticism and 50% philosophy and written for a general audience. 

My work in aesthetics has been eclectic. I collaborated with Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley University) on a paper on cultural appropriation that was published recently in Philosophical Studies. Carrying over my interest in pleasure from my work in Ancient, I’ve written about hedonic ambivalence and the question of how negative emotion can figure positively in the appreciation of art. I have lifelong interests in film and food, and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to tie these interests in with my academic work. I have a new paper in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism titled “On Culinary Authenticity.” I am honored to blog about aesthetics regularly over at Aesthetics for Birds.