Tammy Nyden’s Home Page

Tammy Nyden (she, her, hers) is a philosophy professor at Grinnell College; co-founder & co-director of Mothers on the Frontline; and an advocate and activist for Children’s Mental Health Justice.  She has received awards for her state and local children’s mental health advocacy, including the 2014 Advocate of the Year from Iowans with Disabilities in Action and the 2016 Iowa City Human Rights Commission’s Isabel Turner Award. Her scholarship on Spinoza and the history & philosophy of science has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, The American Philosophical Society, the Scalinger Institute at Leiden University, The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, and the Fulbright Foundation. However, her experiences as a mother and advocate in stigmatized spaces has moved her scholarship in the direction of epistemic injustice, and applications of Spinoza’s philosophy as correctives for the many Cartesian ghosts haunting the halls of stigma and oppression. She brings this work to her teaching on the School to Prison Pipeline and Storywork as a form of resistance.

Books:

Spinoza’s Radical Cartesian Mind, Continuum 2007  (Author)

Cartesian Empiricisms, Springer 2013 (Co-edited with Mihnea Dobre)

More information on research and teaching is available here.

More information on advocacy, activism, and public speaking is available here.