PHILADELPHIA – Karen Detlefsen, associate professor of philosophy and education at the University of Pennsylvania, is the recipient of a 2012 American Council of Learned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship.  She is among 15 scholars selected to work in groups of two to three on single, substantive projects.

Detlefsen will collaborate with Andrew Janiak, an associate professor at Duke University, to produce the first English-language book on the philosophy and intellectual landscape of Émilie du Châtelet, a French mathematician, physicist and author during the Age of Enlightenment. She translated Issac Newton’s work Principia Mathematica.  

Detlefsen is currently working on a project on the relationship between the life sciences and metaphysics in the 17th and 18th centuries.  She has teaching interests in the philosophy of education and will eventually conduct research on early modern educational theories, including an investigation of theories of women's education in the 17th and 18th centuries.

ACLS, a private, nonprofit federation of 71 national scholarly organizations, advances scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences by awarding fellowships and strengthening relations among learned societies. Program details and the full list of 2012 awardees are at http://www.acls.org/research/cr.aspx?id=4378&linkidentifier=id&itemid=4378.