John Duncan

John Duncan completed his PhD in the interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University in 1998, after which he joined the faculty at the University of King’s College in Halifax. In 2002 he founded the society for the study of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC) and served as its president until May 2009. During a 2004-05 sabbatical leave he was Ashley Fellow at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, a year in which he co-founded PhaenEx, EPTC's interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal. He remains a PhaenEx executive editor. In the summer of 2005 he was appointed assistant professor and director of the Faculty of Arts and Science major program in Ethics, Society, and Law ("E-S-and-L"), hosted by Trinity College in the University of Toronto (U of T), as well as an instructor in the Margaret MacMillan Trinity One Program in public policy, ethics, international relations, and health science, for which he served as director from July 2012 to August 2014. From 2006 to 2011 he was an executive member of the U of T’s Centre for Ethics, for which he organized the October 2011 Public Issues Forum: “On the very idea of a good war: Afghanistan ten years in.” Beginning at Trinity in 2007 and continuing in partnership with Victoria College in the University of Toronto (where he is an associate) from 2010, he co-founded the Humanities for Humanity (“H4H”) engagement/outreach program and remains its academic director. Since 2011 he has served as the academic director for the Theatre for Thought engagement/outreach program, part of Victoria College’s Ideas for the World program. In January 2014 he became the first holder of the appointment of Academic Director for the Ideas for the World program at Victoria. In September 2013 he founded Trinity's Humanities for Humanity.2 (“H4H.2”) engagement/outreach program. He served from June 2013 to June 2015 as Vice President of the Canadian Peace Research Association (CPRA), from June 2015 to July 2017 as the CPRA National Editor, and from June 2015 to June 2019 as a Board Member for Science for Peace at the University of Toronto. In September 2017 he launched the Trinity, U of T Forum on Canadian and Commonwealth Indigenous-Settler Relations. He has co-edited volumes on the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (_Rousseau and Desire_, University of Toronto Press, 2009) and peace studies (_Peace Issues in the 21st Century Global Context_, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), as well as issues of PhaenEx, and written chapters, articles, reviews and opinion pieces on the history of philosophy, continental philosophy, politics, and engaged/outreach education. His feature article on close air support and civilian casualties in Afghanistan, “Death from Above,” first published in _This Magazine_ (March/April, 2010), was re-published in Tightrope Books’ _The Best Canadian Essays: 2011_. Recently, he has published on the Frankfurt School, on Afghanistan, on Camus and COVID-19, on US policy in Iran, on outreach/engagement education.