Nancy Bauer is an American philosopher specializing in feminist philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology, and the work of Simone de Beauvoir. She was recently Chair of the Philosophy Department at Tufts University and is currently Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Philosophy as well as the Dean of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. Her interests include methodology in philosophy, feminism, metaphysics, social/political/moral philosophy, philosophy of language, phenomenology, and philosophy in film. Education and career Bauer earned an A. B. in Social Studies, magna cum laude, from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in 1982. She earned a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School in 1986, and was a Ph.D. candidate in the Study of Religion, 1986–1988. She earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1997, studying under Stanley Cavell. Prior to her position as a professor, she was a journalist, holding a position on the Metro Desk at the Boston Globe, where she also served as the paper's first full-time Cape Cod beat reporter. She has also worked for Boston Children's Hospital and contributed to the New Child Health Encyclopedia. Research and publications Bauer's first book was "Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism," New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. She has also published on pornography, objectification, and philosophy of film. In a June 20, 2010 New York Times opinion piece, she wrote: The goal of "The Second Sex" is to get women, and men, to crave freedom — social, political and psychological — more than the precarious kind of happiness that an unjust world intermittently begrudges to the people who play by its rules. Beauvoir warned that you can't just will yourself to be free, that is, to abjure relentlessly the temptations to want only what the world wants you to want. For her the job of the philosopher, at least as much as the fiction writer, is to re-describe how things are in a way that competes with the status quo story and leaves us craving social justice and the truly wide berth for self-expression that only it can provide. She is a member of the Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology. Awards Joseph A. and Lillian Leibner Award for Distinguished Advising and Teaching, 2005 Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, 2002–2003 Publications "Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism," New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. "Hegel and Feminist Politics: A Symposium," with Kimberley Hutchings, Tuija Pulkkinen,