This year, under our new president Nathan Kellen, the PGSA is undergoing major changes, dramatically expanding its functions. We have started an Annual Graduate Conference, a biannual internal Grue Bag Conference, and a series of internal workshops called Grue Shops. We have also revised our constitution to include postdoctoral fellows as members of the PGSA.

The Annual Graduate Conference is the spiritual successor of the now defunct UConn-Yale Graduate Conference. The Annual Graduate Conference is a conference with invited graduate speakers, and a faculty keynote speaker, held at UConn using new funding from the Graduate Student Senate.

We have expanded our Grue Bag Series by adding a semesterly Grue Bag Conference, a one-day internal conference with two parallel sessions in which UConn students present their work and receive feedback from other UConn students. We have also scaled back the number of our traditional Grue Bag Presentations (internal graduate student talks), replacing some of them with a new workshop format called Grue Shops.

On Oct. 26 we ratified a new constitution. The most important change in this constitution is that it makes UConn postdoctoral fellows members of the PGSA, with access to all PGSA functions.

We thank our president Nathan, our secretary Hanna Gunn, and many other members of the PGSA for their efforts to make all of these great new changes happen! We look forward to continuing to see our vision of a new PGSA put into reality, and we hope that these positive changes carry forward well into the future.

This year Ken Ito joins us as a new graduate student funded by the Fulbright Foreign Student Program. Ken hails from Doshisha University in Japan, and before arriving at UConn he has published in Philosophical Research, The Bulletin of the Japanese Society for British Idealism, and the Doshisha Annual of Philosophy. We are excited to welcome Ken, and all of our incoming graduate students!

This year Paul Simard Smith, a new postdoctoral fellow, joins us with from the University of Waterloo with a prestigious Social Science and Humanities Research Council fellowship. Paul’s research is in the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology. He is particularly interested in logical pluralism. He will be with us for two years, supervised by Jc Beall.

This year we’d like to welcome an exciting batch of new fellow students, co-workers, and friends!

• Teresa Allen received her BA in philosophy and a minor in Greek from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. From there, she continued her studies at Northern Illinois University, where she received her MA in philosophy in 2014. Her primary interests lie in philosophy of language, metaethics, and ethics.
• Rasa Davidaviciute received her BA in philosophy from Vilnius University and MA from Central European University. Her research interest are Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics, mathematical intuition and history of analytic philosophy. Aside from doing philosophy Rasa enjoys watching the Twilight Zone, gardening and translating Lithuanian proverbs into English.
• Sean-Michael Green is a new graduate student with an interest in metaphysics and modern philosophy. He earned his undergraduate degree (in philosophy) at the University of Pittsburgh, and he holds graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University. He has served on various boards including Big Brothers Big Sisters and Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo. He is the author of a book, many chapters, and dozens of articles – none of which are especially philosophical in nature. He currently works as a senior administrator at another university. Prior to working in higher education, Sean-Michael has been the CEO of successful companies, a United States Marine, a licensed attorney, and a stand-up comedian.
• Ken Ito was born in Amagasaki, near Osaka. He earned a BA and MA in Philosophy at Doshisha University. Before arriving at UConn, he has published in Philosophical Research, The Bulletin of the Japanese Society for British Idealism, and the Doshisha Annual of Philosophy.
• Dana Francisco Miranda is a graduate of Bard College where he earned his BA in Philosophy. He is interested in 20th century continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, the philosophy of history, and such thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Amilcar Cabral, Johan Degenaar, and Algirdas Julien Greimas. He is a first-generation Cabo Verdean-American born in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
• Colin McCullough-Benner received a BA from Miami University and an MA from Central European University, both in philosophy. His main interests are in philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of mathematics. Besides philosophy, he likes cooking, origami, and Brazilian popular music.
• Andrew Tedder earned an MA in Philosophy at the University of Alberta, awarded 2014 on Paraconsistent logic and Inconsistent Arithmetic. His BA is from the University of Lethbridge. He is excited to join the vibrant UConn philosophy community. His research interests are in Logic, Philosophy of Mathematics and History of Analytic Philosophy, particularly Carnap and Frege. He also plays bass and enjoys wargaming.