On July 1, 2002, Dr. Jeffrey H. Barker officially began his duties as Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Converse College.  Dr. Barker teaches courses in biomedical ethics at Converse, where his students explore a variety of ethical issues on the frontier of biomedicine. His recent scholarly work includes essays on ethical issues in population genomics and in the use of children in biomedical research.

Prior to his post at Converse, Dean Barker had served at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he was chairperson and professor for the college’s department of philosophy. He taught a wide variety of courses in ethics, biomedical ethics, philosophy and law, and contemporary European philosophy, in addition to interdisciplinary courses in philosophy and film. He founded and directed the Albright Center for Ethics, Law, and Medicine, a forum for public presentations, internships, and courses in ethics, medicine and law. He also directed the college’s Accelerated Degree Start Program. Under his leadership, Albright completed a comprehensive self-study and strategic planning effort, which included re-accreditation.

In the Winter of 2000, he served as visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík, where he taught an upper-level seminar in health and human rights and presented a university lecture on genetic therapy research and xenotransplantation.

In addition to his 1986 book, Individualism and Community: The State in Marx and Early Anarchism, Dean Barker has published works in several philosophy journals and law reviews, including The Review of Law and Social Policy, Medicine, Healthcare, and Philosophy, Choice, Teaching Philosophy, Eros, and Cogito. He contributed lead articles to The Oxford Companion to the Body, focused on his research interests in bioethics, ethics, and the human face.

Dean Barker graduated with honors from California State University where he majored in history and philosophy. He earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in philosophy from Purdue University.

Barker's selected publications and works in progress include:

Books:

Individualism and Community: The State in Marx and Early Anarchism (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1986)

Book Chapters, Essays and Reviews:

“This is Water: The Ethics of Memory,” an invited review essay of Avishai Margalit’s The Ethics of Memory (Harvard University Press, 2002), published on-line at H-GENOCIDE, December 2006. (Available at: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=284431169496541)

 “Common-Pool Resources and Population Genomics in Iceland, Estonia, and Tonga,” in Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 6:133-144 (2003); reprinted on-line through SpringerLink at http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1024137832504. 

“Cod, Vikings, and Population Genomics in Iceland: Comment on Gísli Pálsson and Kristín E. Harðardóttir, ‘For Whom the Cell Tolls,’” Current Anthropology 43: 2 (April 2002), 287.

“The Face” (lead essay), “Chin,” “Epicanthic Fold,” “Dimples,” and “Freckles,” in Blakemore and Jennett, eds, Oxford University Press Companion to the Body, (Oxford University Press, October 2001)

“Human Experimentation and the Double Facelessness of a Merciless Epoch,” Review of Law & Social Change XXV: 4 (1999; published 2001), 603-623

“Respect for Persons, Informed Consent, and the Assessment of Infectious Disease Risks in Xenotransplantation,”(with Lauren Polcrack), Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 4: 53-70, 2001

 “Facing Biomedicine: Levinas, Løgstrup, and An Ethics of the Interhuman,” in Apollon, Fure, and Svåsand, eds,  Approaching a New Millenium: Lessons from the Past—Prospects for the Future, Proceedings of ISSEI 2000, Winter 2001 (University of Bergen, on CD-ROM)

"The Holocaust and Moral Dissonance in Postmodern Discourse," The European Legacy, Fall 1998 (on CD-ROM)

"Capital Punishment in the New Europe," The European Legacy 1:2 (April 1996), pp. 812-819

Review essay, on Donald L. Gelpi, ed. Beyond Individualism: Toward a Retrieval of Moral Discourse in America (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), in Teaching Philosophy 13:4 (December 1990), pp. 407-409

"The Immorality of Credible Nuclear Bluffs," Public Affairs Quarterly 3:3 (July 1989), pp. 1-14

""Is Something Rotten? Logic, Nature,and Culture in The Closing of the American Mind," Albright 2:1 (Spring/Summer 1989), pp. 24-29

"Sartre's Dialectical Anarchism: Institution, Sovereignty, and the State," Cogito 2:1 (June 1984), pp. 93-115

"Hume on the Pre-Social State," Auslegung 10:3 (Winter 1983), pp. 185-193

Review essay, "Situating Sartre: A Review of Ronald Aronson's Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World," Eros 8:1 (Spring 1981), pp. 116-121

"Camus and Sisyphus: The Cycle of the Absurd," Eros 6:2 (1979), pp. 16-27

 In addition, Barker has published more than two dozen book reviews.