Faculty

sherri irvin

Sherri IrvinAssociate Professor
Ph.D., Princeton
Research areas: Aesthetics, Ethics

(405) 325-6589
sirvin@ou.edu
office hours

Photo by Keisha Register

I specialize in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. My interests range widely, but I have written quite a bit on matters related to contemporary art and on aesthetic experience in everyday life. I have a strong interest in ethics, particularly the relevance of aesthetic considerations to moral agency. I am currently working on a book, tentatively titled Challenging Objects: A Philosophy of Contemporary Art.

I am a mentor for the 2012 Oklahoma Art Writing and Curatorial Fellowships, a program of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. I am the Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art section editor for Philosophy Compass, Blackwell's online journal. In December 2010, I gave the Seventh Annual Parodi Lecture in Philosophy of Art at the Miami Art Museum (co-organized with the University of Miami Department of Philosophy).

Courses (recent or upcoming):

1213 Intro to Ethics
3023 Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art)
3293 Environmental Ethics
3753 Philosophy and Race
4293/5293 Survey of Analytic Aesthetics
6593 Seminar: The Ontology of Art
6593 Seminar: The Philosophy of Contemporary Art

Awards:

  • Irene Rothbaum Award for the Outstanding Assistant Professor in Arts and Sciences, University of Oklahoma, 2008
  • Museum Management and Curatorship Best Paper Award in the Curatorship category, 2006
  • American Society for Aesthetics John Fisher Memorial Prize, 2005

Interviews:

Shannon Fitzgerald interviewed me for Art Focus Oklahoma's January/February 2011 issue (see pp. 8-10).

Jian Gomeshi interviewed me about appropriation art for his show Q on CBC Radio in Canada in Dec. 2007.  Audio is here.  (The segment on appropriation art begins about 1/3 of the way through the linked podcast; my interview begins about half way through.)

Publications:

Click here for full CV (.pdf)

"Installation Art and Performance: A Shared Ontology." Art and Abstract Objects, ed. Christy Mag Uidhir (Oxford, forthcoming). 8300 words. (draft .pdf)

"Artwork and Document in the Photography of Louise Lawler." Forthcoming in a special issue on The Media of Photography edited by Diarmuid Costello and Dominic McIver Lopes, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (2012). 7000 words. (draft .pdf)

“Artworks, Objects and Structures.” The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Anna Christina Ribeiro (Continuum, in press), 55-73. (draft .pdf)

“Motherhood and the Workings of Disgust.” Maternal Subjects: Philosophical Inquiry into Pregnancy, Childbirth & Mothering, ed. Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt (Routledge, in press), 79-90. (draft .pdf)

“Aesthetics as a Guide to Ethics.” Aesthetics Today: A Reader, ed. Robert Stecker and Theodore Gracyk (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 370-377. (draft .pdf)

“Theatrical Performances and the Works Performed.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 43 (fall 2009), 37-50. (draft .pdf)

“Aesthetics and the Private Realm.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009), 226-230. (draft .pdf)

“Aesthetics of the Everyday.” A Companion to Aesthetics (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy), 2nd edition, ed. Stephen Davies, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker and David Cooper (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 136-139. (draft .pdf)

“The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks.” New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1-19. (.pdf)

“The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience.” British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008), 29-44. (draft .pdf)

“Scratching an Itch.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (2008), 25-35. (draft .pdf)

“Forgery and the Corruption of Aesthetic Understanding.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (2007), 283-304. (draft .pdf)

“L’œuvre d’art et l’intention de l’artiste.” Dictionnaire d'esthétique et de philosophie de l'art, ed. Jacques Morizot and Roger Pouivet (Paris: Colin, 2007), 251-254. (draft .pdf)

“Museums and the Shaping of Contemporary Artworks.” Museum Management and Curatorship 21 (2006), 143-156. (draft .pdf)

“Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning.” Philosophy Compass 1 (2006), 114-128. (.pdf)

“The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005), 315-326. (draft .pdf)

“Appropriation and Authorship in Contemporary Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 45 (2005), 123-137. (draft .pdf)

“Interprétation et description d’une œuvre d’art.” Philosophiques 32 (2005), 135-148. (.pdf)

“Artworks and Representational Properties.” Dialogue 43 (2004), 627-644. (draft .pdf)

“Capacities, Context and the Moral Status of Animals.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 21 (2004), 61-76. (draft .pdf)

“Does Contemporary Art Have Cognitive Value?” AE: Canadian Aesthetics Journal 8 (2003).

Work Under Review or in Progress:

Challenging Objects: A Philosophy of Contemporary Art (working title).

“Setting an Example: The Aesthetic Dimension of Moral Activity.” 5000 words (draft .pdf)

"Is Aesthetic Experience Possible?" 7500 words. (draft .pdf) 

“Unreadable Poems and How They Mean.” Invited for The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson, Oxford University Press. 8000 words. (draft .pdf)

"Sex Objects and Sexy Subjects," with Sheila Lintott. Delivered at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. 4000 words. (draft .pdf)

“Sculpture.” Invited for the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 3rd ed., ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, Routledge.