Eric Thomas Weber
Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Dr. Eric Thomas Weber is associate professor of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation in the College of Education and, starting in August of 2024, serves as the department's Director of Graduate Studies. In the spring of 2024, he was named one of the University of Kentucky Alumni Association's Great Teacher Award-winners. He joined the faculty in EPE in the fall of 2018 after teaching for two years in the Philosophy department at the University of Kentucky. Before that, he was assistant and then associate professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi, where he taught from 2007 to 2016. His Ph.D. is in philosophy with a focus on John Dewey’s work, applied to democracy, education, and justice.
Weber’s books include a critique of John Rawls’s work, titled Rawls, Dewey, and Constructivism (2010), offering a Deweyan alternative that calls for more robust democratic education. His next book presented an experimentalist approach to ethics in public policy in Morality, Leadership, and Public Policy (2011). Work on that project revealed for him the need for addressing the challenges for a theory of democratic leadership, which he wrote about next in Democracy and Leadership (2013). That project inspired his next book, an application of his theory of democratic leadership to problems in the state of Mississippi, titled Uniting Mississippi (2015). In 2021, he published an edited collection of John Dewey’s public writings, titled America’s Public Philosopher, with Columbia University Press. His latest book, A Culture of Justice, is forthcoming with the State University of New York (SUNY) Press.
Weber is also the Executive Director of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA), Inc., an educational nonprofit founded in 1983. In that role he produces and co-hosts the syndicated and award-winning Philosophy Bakes Bread radio show and podcast on WRFL Lexington 88.1 FM in Lexington, KY. The station recognize the program as its “Overall Favorite Show.” He is also a member of the Lexington SOPHIA Chapter. SOPHIA was recognized in 2018 with the American Philosophical Association and Philosophy Documentation Center Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Philosophy Programs.
In 2015, the Mississippi Humanities Council selected Weber’s work for the Humanities Scholar Award in their public humanities awards program. In 2012, The University of Mississippi recognized him with the Thomas F. Frist Student Service Award. And in 2011, he received the Cora Lee Graham Award for Outstanding Teaching from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Mississippi.
You can connect with Weber on social media, particularly on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Research Interests: Educational Leadership, Human Rights, Leadership, Philosophy of Education, Policy, Politics of Education, Self-Beliefs, Social Justice