Fall office hours: by appointment only
Commonly Taught Courses
Philosophy 110 (Introduction to Philosophy), Philosophy 214 (Introduction to the Philosophy of Art), Spanish 339 (Introduction to Spanish Literature), Spanish 355 (Spanish American Culture), Spanish 451 (Survey of Spanish American Literature), Spanish 455R/655R (Seminar in Spanish American Poetry), Spanish 459R/650R (Borges, Philosophy, and New Media)
Biography
David Laraway received his PhD in Romance Studies (Hispanic Literature, with a minor in Comparative Literature and additional coursework in Philosophy) from Cornell University in 1998, writing his doctoral dissertation on Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In addition to Árbol de imágenes: nueva historia de la poesía hispanoamericana (with Merlin H. Forster), he is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, from modernista poetry to contemporary Basque narrative to Chilean cyberpunk. He recently completed a second PhD in Philosophy, Art, and Social Thought at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he took seminars from Simon Critchley, Peter Singer, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt, and Lev Manovich, among others. In addition to American Idiots: Outsider Music, Outsider Art, and the Philosophy of Incompetence (New York: Atropos Press, 2018), he is the author of Borges and Black Mirror (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Dr. Laraway served as the chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Brigham Young University from 2011-2017 and has been appointed to serve a term as chair of the Department of Philosophy (2019-2022). A native of Boise, Idaho, he also takes a keen interest in his own Basque roots and the experience of Basque immigrants in the American West.
Degrees
PhD, European Graduate School (2015) [Philosophy, Art, and Social Thought]
PhD coursework and qualifying exam, University of Utah (2001-2003) [Philosophy]
PhD, Cornell U. (1998) [Romance Studies, with an emphasis in Hispanic Literatures]
MA, Brigham Young U. (1994) [Spanish]
BA, Brigham Young U. (1992) [Philosophy and Spanish]
Interests
Hispanic Literature and Culture (Spanish American poetry; Borges; Basque and Basque-American literature and culture)
Philosophy (Aesthetics, Philosophy of Literature; Philosophy in Spain and Latin America)