Claire Katz

Claire Katz is Associate Provost for Faculty Advocacy, having recently served as Department Head of Teaching, Learning, and Culture in the College of Education and Human Development.

A professor of philosophy and education at Texas A&M, she has been on the Texas A&M faculty since 2006. Prior to coming to A&M, she was an associate professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Penn State University. From 2019-2022, she served as Associate Dean of Faculties/Associate Vice President for Faculty Affairs. From 2010-2014, she served as Director of Women’s and Gender Studies (Texas A&M). In September 2020, she was named a Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence (Texas A&M) and in May 2021 she was selected for a Piper Professorship.

A Baltimore native, she is loyal fan of the Baltimore Orioles and majored in philosophy at the University of Maryland - Baltimore County. She holds a Master’s of Arts in Teaching (teaching of philosophy to K-12 students) from Montclair State University and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Memphis. She teaches and conducts research in two primary areas: (1) the intersection of philosophy, gender, education, and religion—with a particular focus on 20^th century French philosophy and (2) K-12 philosophy. At Texas A&M, she developed and piloted courses in Jewish philosophy, Philosophy and Gender, and K-12 Philosophy.

In 2015, Dr. Katz launched a highly successful K-12 philosophy program, which includes three prongs: educator workshops for K-12 and university teachers/administrators, which have reached more than one hundred teachers and administrators throughout Texas; training for university students in facilitating philosophical discussions with pre-college students, which includes an undergraduate course that teaches students to teach philosophy to K-12 students; and developing and running a week-long philosophy summer camp (Aggie School of Athens) for 6th-12th graders, which attracts middle and high school students from communities across Texas and around the United States. Her development of the pre-college philosophy program at Texas A&M, including the philosophy summer camp, has become leading model for pre-college philosophy programs nationally and internationally. Under her direction, P4C Texas and the Aggie School of Athens Philosophy Camp for Teens was awarded the 2020 APA/PDC prize for Excellence and Innovation in Philosophy Programs. In 2016, Philosophy Ireland, Ireland’s pre-college philosophy program, appointed her an Ambassador. She held the Liberal Arts Cornerstone Faculty Fellowship (Texas A&M 2011-2015) and a Copeland Fellowship (Amherst College 2011-12) and was recently awarded a 2022 Arts and Humanities Fellowship (Texas A&M) and a 2023 Glasscock Center for Humanities Research Residential Fellowship.

She has given more than 150 presentations nationally and internationally. A stalwart defender of the humanities, Dr. Katz presented on the value of the humanities for TEDx TAMU (2015) and in March 2022, she was elected to the Board of Directors for the National Humanities Alliance. In addition to more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, Professor Katz is the author of three monographs: Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (Indiana 2003); Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism (Indiana 2013); and An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy (I.B.Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2014). She is the editor of the four volume Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments (with Lara Trout, Routledge 2005), Growing Up with Philosophy Camp: How Thinking Develops Friendship, Community, and a Sense of Self (Rowman and Littlefield, August 2020), and Philosophy Camps for Youth: Everything You Wanted to Know about Starting, Organizing, and Running a Philosophy Camp (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). She recently completed a co-edited collection with Anna Gotlib (Brooklyn College): In a Barbie World: Barbie as Narrative, Symbol, Cipher (Routledge, March 2025). She is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled, Radical Apology: Gender, Religion, and the Limits of Forgiveness (under advance contract with Indiana University Press) with a chapter devoted to The Chicks.

She is the recipient of the 2019 Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award (University Level) for Teaching and the 2019 American Philosophical Association Prize for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy. She was a finalist for the 2024 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Excellence in Teaching, a national teaching award at Baylor University.