Christia Mercer

Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University.

Born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, Mercer received her PhD from Princeton University in 1989 after studying art history at Brooklyn College. In between, she studied Latin with Reginald Foster at the Gregorian University in Rome in 1980, and received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the Leibniz Archives in the University of Münster in 1984.

Mercer has been at Columbia University since 1991. She works primarily in early modern philosophy and is the author of Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (CUP, 2001), which offers a new interpretation of Leibniz's philosophical development. She has published widely on the diversity and importance of early modern Platonisms with a forthcoming book on the philosophy of the English Platonist, Anne Conway, Exploring the Philosophy of Anne Conway.

Mercer’s current major research projects include Feeling the Way to Truth: Women, Reason and the Development of Modern Philosophy, which argues that historians of philosophy need to rethink core assumptions about seventeenth-century philosophy and that the writings of women play a much more significant part in that history than has been recognized; and Platonisms in Early Modern Thought, whose goal is to articulate the diversity of Platonisms that form the background to early modern thought and identify the range of Platonist assumptions underling early modern philosophy, theology, and art.

From 2004 to 2015, Mercer was the North American Editor for Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. She is also the editor of a new series of books, entitled Oxford Philosophical Concepts. Each of the volumes traces the historical development of central philosophical concepts and includes interdisciplinary "reflections." As of 2015, there are 30 volumes in various stages of production, and 5 published. These include Space, Memory, Consciousness, Self-Knowledge, Efficient Causation, Sympathy, Evil, and the Soul.

Along with Eileen O'Neill and Andrew Janiak, she is co-editor of a new series, Oxford New Histories of Philosophy, which "speaks to a growing concern to broaden and reexamine philosophy’s past."

From 2010-2012 and 2013-2014, Mercer was the Chair for the Core Curriculum course, Literature Humanities, an interdisciplinary course on the masterpieces of Western literature and philosophy taken by all first-year undergraduates at Columbia College. She was the Director for the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia from 2000-2001.

In 2012, Mercer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She won the 2008 Columbia College Great Teacher Award and the 2012 Mark van Doren Award, which annually recognizes a professor for her "commitment to undergraduate instruction, as well as for humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership." She gave the Ernst Cassirer Lectures at the University of Hamburg in 2005.

She has also written articles on plagiarism, Literature Humanities, and the importance of "being queer" for the Columbia Daily Spectator undergraduate newspaper. She appears in Pat Blute’s Hardcore as a naughty professor, a comic comment on Literature Humanities and the Core Curriculum at Columbia.

Mercer's Twitter profile describes her as a "sometimes activist." In 2015, she was the first Columbia University professor to teach in a prison as part of Columbia’s Justice In-Education Initiative. At Taconic Correctional Facility, she taught female prisoners texts including the Aeschylus's Oresteia, Euripides's Medea, Aristophanes's Lysistrata, and William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. She has been active in the education and prison reform movements, publishing op-eds and posts in the Washington Post and other outlets about philosophy's gender bias, the history of Christianity, and the prison-industrial complex. In 2015, her post on the Columbia prison divestment campaign was publicly challenged by Jonathan Burns, director of public affairs for the Corrections Corporation of America, who accused her of making "multiple misleading and false statements about our company." Mercer's response argued that "Mr. Burns’s demand for corrections exemplifies the tortured logic of the corporation he represents."

• Fellowship, Folger Shakespeare Library, Spring, 2016.
• Senior Professor, Villa I Tatti, Florence, Italy, Fall, 2015.
• Resident Fellow, American Academy, Rome, Italy, Spring, 2013.
• Sovereign/Columbia Affiliated Fellowship, American Academy, Rome, Italy, 2010-11.
• Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy, 2009–present.
• Great Teacher Award, Society of Columbia Graduates, Columbia College, 2008.
• Gustave M. Berne Professorship in the Core Curriculum at Columbia College, 2003-2009.
• North American Editor, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2002–2015.
• Guest Professor, Centre Alexandre Koyré, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, December 2003, November 5, December 7.
• Ernst Cassirer Lectures, Ernst Cassirer Guest Professorship, Philosophy Faculty, University of Hamburg, Spring 2006.

• Oxford Philosophical Concepts, General Editor
• Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter, and Mechanism (co-edited with Eileen O´Neill), Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, Cambridge University Press, 2001; paperback edition, 2006.