Michelle Panchuk is an assistant professor of philosophy in the Department of English and Philosophy at Murray State University. She earned her BA from Columbia International University (2007) and both her MA and PhD in philosophy from the University of South Carolina (2012 and 2016, respectively). Her areas of specialization are philosophy of religion, philosophy of trauma, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. At Murray State, she teaches courses such as Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Literature and Philosophy, Mind and Reality (History of Metaphysics), Philosophy: The Big Questions, Philosophy of Race, Science Fiction and Feminism, Themes in Russian Literature, and Russian Philosophy.
Dr. Panchuk has had several publications this year, including “Distorting Concepts, Obscured Experiences: On the Role of Hermeneutical Injustice in Religious Trauma,” which was just accepted for publication in Hypatia. Another article, “The Simplicity of Divine Ideas: Theistic Conceptual Realism and the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity” is forthcoming in Religious Studies. Also, her essay “That We May be Whole: Doing Philosophy of Religion with the Whole Self” appeared this year in The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion: New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals, edited by Blake Hereth and Kevin Timpe, and published by Routledge. In addition to these articles, she has co-edited a volume of essays with Michael Rea at Notre Dame. The collection, Voices from the Edge: Centering Marginalized Perspectives in Analytic Theology, is in press currently at Oxford University Press, and should be out by the end of 2019.
Currently, Dr. Panchuk is working on a monograph titled Believing in Trauma, which focuses on religious trauma, along with an article about the relationship between oppression-based trauma and narrative conceptions of the self. Dr. Panchuk has received a 2019-2020 Professional Development and Scholarly/Creative Activity Research Grant from Murray State’s College of Humanities and Fine Arts for her research project: “Religious Belief and Practice in Religious Trauma: A Focus Group Study.” She has also received a 2019-2020 Research Circle Grant from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts for her research circle, “Mentoring Writing in the Humanities.”
Links to Interviews
(1) “What is Religious Trauma?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BQF7qvtkGQ&index=38&list=PLUwpbayMegSQgoLiRsmN5NLkCn7T0iGuT
(2) “How Have Communities Perpetuated Religious Trauma?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfFvJPDBeHs&index=37&list=PLUwpbayMegSQgoLiRsmN5NLkCn7T0iGuT&t=2s
(3) “How Can Religious Communities Support Sufferers of Religious Trauma?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TSBBGCijyU&list=PLUwpbayMegSQgoLiRsmN5NLkCn7T0iGuT&index=37
(4) “How is Religious Trauma Related to the Traditional Problems of Evil and Divine Hiddenness?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e53NH5JbCng&list=PLUwpbayMegSQgoLiRsmN5NLkCn7T0iGuT&index=39
College of humanities and fine arts 