Professional Summary
John Shahan is orginally from Nashville, TN. He completed his undergraduate education at Belmont University. There he double majored in German and Philosophy. At Belmont, John studied a variety of different types of philosophy and picked up an interest in Asian Philosophy, as well as in Hesse and Goethe. John attended Baylor University in Texas from 2005-2007, where he earned a Master of Arts in Philosophy. John took away a love for Greek philosophy, as well as Pragmatism and some Continental Philosophy.
John came to U.C. in 2009, to begin his doctoral studies. At that time, he had decided that he could achieve many of his academic goals by studying German studies. During his M.A., he had only a limited opportunity to study German literature on a scholarly level and so decided that it would be possible to study German literature and literary theory at U.C., thus satisfying the goal to continue on in German, while at the same time having the freedom to continue on in a multi-disciplinary sense with studies in philosophy. At this point, John is ABD and is beginning to work on his dissertation. Just as he had hoped for all along, he will engage in a project involving a hybridization of philosophy and literature, including such thinkers as Kant and Habermas, in order to evaluate the relationship between the individual and the state. John also intends to make use of detective fiction and spy fiction as part of his project. In addition, John hopes one day to teach a class on literature associated with the Thirty-Years War.
Academic Interests: works by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, German film, Kant, Hegel, Foucault, Habermas and Rawls, Anglo-American spy ficton. Also Grimmelshausen, Schiller, Goethe.
Other interests: Hinduism, East Asian philosophy, Continental Philosophy, science fiction, Russian film, Chinese Film, European Film