Kathryn Belle

Kathryn Sophia Belle, PhD, is Associate Professor of Philosophy and an affiliate faculty member in African American Studies as well as Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her primary research and teaching interests lie in African American/Africana philosophy, Black Feminist philosophy, Continental philosophy (especially existentialism and phenomenology), and critical philosophy of race. Some of the major figures she writes about and teaches include Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Anna Julia Cooper, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Richard Wright. She has published articles on race, assimilation, feminism, intersectionality, and sex and sexuality in contemporary hip-hop. Under the name Kathryn T. Gines, she  co-edited an anthology titled Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010) and wrote Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana UP, 2014). Professor Belle is the founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (CBWP), the former director (2010-2016) of Cultivating Underrepresented Students in Philosophy (CUSP), and a founding co-editor (2013-2016) of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race (CPR). She is also founder and owner of La Belle Vie Coaching, offering initiatives for (1) high achievers, (2) the happily unmarried, and (3) erotic empowerment.