Carrie Jenkins

Wall Scholar

Department/School

Department of Philosophy

Faculty

Arts

University

UBC

Geographic Location

Canada
Carrie Jenkins

Over the last five years, Prof. Carrie Jenkins has been concocting an unusual blend of interdisciplinary, public-facing, and creative scholarship. Her practice mixes research, public engagement, and creative writing in criss-crossing genres of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Currently, her focal subject matters are love (especially romantic love), magic, and the nature of meaning (in the broadest sense, ranging from the meaning of a word to the meaning of an individual’s life).

Prof. Jenkins holds a PhD in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge and is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. She has published two books, What Love Is and What It Could Be (Basic Books, 2017), and Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge, (Oxford University Press, 2008). Prof. Jenkins has also written for New Statesman, The Globe and Mail, Aeon, and EL PAIS. Interviews and/or articles about her work have been featured in Time magazine, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Chronical of Higher Education, Vox, Elle, and Cosmopolitan, and she has appeared on ABC Nightline, CBC’s The Current, Early Edition, On the Coast, and q. Her grants include a ten-year Canada Research Chair and a three-year SSHRC Insight Grant. Other recent honours include a Public Philosophy prize from the American Philosophical Association, and a New Philosopher Writers’ Award for her short story “The Woman at Home.”

Prof. Jenkin’s non-fiction book, The Romantic Paradox: A New Philosophy of Love was published by Polity in 2020. A book of collaborative poetry, Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato’s Symposium, co-authored with historian Carla Nappi, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2020 and her first novel, Victoria Sees It, was published with Penguin Random House Canada in 2021.

Primary Recipient Awards

Carrie Jenkins – Wall Scholars – 2020

During her residence at the Wall Institute, Prof. Jenkins will be working on a collection of creative scholarly projects deploying the Tarot deck (as classically illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith) as a creative and intellectual prompt. She is also developing ways to support and mentor other academics who wish to pursue creative forms of developing and communicating their research.

Carrie Jenkins – Early Career Scholars – 2012