Dr. James D. Hatley
Professor of Environmental Studies
Faculty Affiliate in Philosophy
Department of Environmental Studies
Fulton School of Liberal Arts
Salisbury University
Salisbury, Maryland 21801
Office:
Perdue Building, Room 222
Telephone: 410-677-5072; Fax:
Email: jdhatley@salisbury.edu
After
twenty years at Salisbury University in the philosophy department, I have now
been reassigned to environmental studies, a department I played an active role
in establishing. My specialty is in
20th Century Continental Philosophy, with an emphasis on the thought
of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In my work on environmental philosophy,
I also focus on the American personalist tradition,
which includes thinkers such as Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Henry Bugbee, Stephen Cavell and Edward Mooney. In the last twenty years, I have
published papers in the fields of Ethics, Social Justice, Aesthetics,
Environmental Philosophy, Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, Extinction
Studies, Teaching Pedagogy and the Philosophy of Literature. Some of the titles: “The Uncanny
Goodness of Being Edible to Bears”; “Naming Adam Naming
Coyote”; “Blood Intimacies: Biodicy and
Keeping Faith with Ticks”; “The Virtue of Temporal Discernment:
Rethinking the Extent and Coherence of the Good in a Time of Mass Species
Extinction”; "Impossible Mourning: Two Attempts to Remember
Annihilation"; “Persecution and Expiation: A Talmudic Amplification
of the Enigma of Responsibility in Levinas”;
and ” “Speaking
with Discretion: Religious and Philosophical Perplexities in Levinas.”
During
my graduate study, I attended the University of Tübingen
as a Fulbright Scholar, where I was introduced to the poetry of Paul Celan. My book, Suffering Witness: the Quandary of
Responsibility after the Irreparable (SUNY Press, 2000), offers a Levinasian account of Celan's
poetry and the responsibility to witness the Shoah
that it elicits. Because of my interest in fostering post-Shoah
Jewish thought and culture, I have been active in the establishment of the
Society for Continental Philosophy in a Jewish Context and served among its
first executive officers. I also
currently serve on the executive board for the North American Levinas Society and was an executive officer for six years
for the International Association for Environmental Philosophy. I am a founding member of the Levinas Research Seminar and on the executive board of the
journal, Environmental Humanities. I currently serve on the book selection
committee for the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.
In
the last decade I have increasingly questioned what role philosophy might
assume in a post-Shoah existence. In this wise I have
co-edited two books of essays: Interrogating
Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty (Duquesne University Press, 2005); and
Facing Nature: Levinasian Ethics and Environmental
Philosophy (Duquesne University Press, 2012). I am now co-editing yet another volume,
which will inaugurate Hineni,
an annual book series focusing on interdisciplinary approaches to the thought
of Emmanuel Levinas. The title of this inaugural offering
will be Cultures in and out of Place.
In
2009, I was invited by Deborah Bird Rose to give the keynote address for a
conference on “Writing at the End of the World” held by the Center
for Research for Social Inclusion at Macquarie University in Australia (http://www.ecologicalhumanities.org/hatley.html). This has led to my membership in Kangaloon (a group of Australasian scholars in the
eco-humanities pursuing a poetics of political activism) and the Extinction
Studies Working Group (http://extinctionstudies.org/).
The latter group is currently working on a set of papers addressing various
exemplars of extinction and the questions they raise for thinkers in the
eco-humanities. My contribution, an
essay written in journal form and titled “Walking with Extinction,”
focuses on the Honshu wolf and was formulated in 2011 while I trekked the
Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Route in Japan as part of my
course, co-developed with Dr. Kumi Kato of Wakayama
University, on Buddhist and Shinto forms of spiritual practice in an
environmental context (JAPANESE
WINTERMESTER). In May of 2010, I co-directed a
conference at Salisbury University focusing on the eco-humanities in a time of
extinction: GeoAesthetics
in the Anthropocene. You can also check out my current blog in
regard to the subject of geoaesthetics at: http://geoaesthetics.blogspot.com/
In
the last three years, the legacy of usurpation of indigenous lands and cultures
in Montana, where I was born and raised, has also emerged as an important
question for me. In collaboration with Nimachia
Hernandez (beginning with a conference held at Columbia University in April of
2010 and titled “Native Americans, Jews and The Western World
Order”), I have written a series of papers—as much story as
philosophical argument—addressing how scholars respectively committed to
the Blackfoot and Abrahamic traditions might question and hear one
another’s questioning in regard to the themes of memory, knowing and
healing raised in the historical landscape of genocide and ecocide, attempted or
otherwise, that is Montana. My most recent collaboration with Dr. Hernandez occurred
in early November of 2012 at a gathering on the theme of Memory and Counter
Memory at the Center for Cultural Studies and Critical Inquiry/Arizona State
University: Program
for Memory and Countermemory
As
a teacher, I take pleasure in exposing students to a wide range of questions
emerging in the eco-humanities and arts, with an emphasis upon critical
analysis, philosophical reflection, and poetic amplification. For the last seven years I have worked
with a class each spring semester to plant a 500 sq. ft. garden as part of our
study of ethical and social responsibility for and to the living world. I am also an active member
of the faculty involved in Religious Studies at Salisbury University. In this wise, I co-developed a course
with Dr. Bob McBrien on “Taoism, Tai-Chi and
Mindfulness.” I also
regularly offer independent study opportunities for students on scriptural
hermeneutics in Jewish, Christian, Taoist and Buddhist traditions.