The Division of the Arts & Humanities announces that Alva Noë will chair the department of Philosophy, as of July 1, 2022. Noë is a philosopher of mind whose research and teaching focus is perception and consciousness, and the philosophy of art.
He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2015); and Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (Oxford University Press, 2019). . His latest book is Learning To Look: Dispatches from the Art World (Oxford, 2022).
Alva received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995 and is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He previously was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been philosopher-in-residence with The Forsythe Company and has also collaborated creatively with dance artists Deborah Hay, Nicole Peisl, Jess Curtis, Claire Cunningham, Katye Coe, and Charlie Morrissey. Alva is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a former fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a 2018 recipient of the Judd/Hume Prize in Advanced Visual Studies. He was a weekly contributor to National Public Radio’s now defunct science blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. Until 2025 Alva is an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Free University in Berlin, where is the director of the Reorganizing Ourselves research group.