Lenore Wright, Ph.D.

BIC Courses: World Culture III, Examined Life III 

After growing up in Grayson, Kentucky, a small rural town, Dr. Lenore Wright's introduction to scholarship at the undergraduate level began at Morehead State University, thirty miles from her hometown. Intent on a pre-law track, she soon switched her major to philosophy through the influence of her Introduction to Philosophy professor and Plato's Republic. At the time, Dr. Wright was the only female philosophy major at the university. Upon completing her undergraduate work, Dr. Wright came to Baylor in 1994 to pursue a Master of Philosophy and subsequently met her husband, Professor Henry Wright. The two then traveled to State University of New York (SUNY) for Dr. Wright to pursue a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Returning to Baylor in 1998, Dr. Wright applied to be Assistant Director of the BIC. For the next five years she served in this capacity, until she began on tenure track in 2003 with the Philosophy Department and the BIC.

Before her faculty appointment, she served as an Assistant Director of the BIC (1999-2003). However incredible it may sound, she has dedicated the entirety of her career to the BIC (BIC really is wonderful). Currently, she is serving as the outgoing Interim Associate Director of the BIC. Prior to this appointment, she served for 13 years as the Director of Baylor’s Academy for Teaching and Learning, ATL (2011-2024). Her faculty rank is Professor (2023- ). In 2025, she was honored to receive the designation of Master Teacher, the highest honor bestowed by Baylor University for sustained excellence in teaching. 

From 2020-2024, she taught a 1/1 teaching load (she received a course load reduction for my administrative work in the ATL and the BIC). She regularly taught BIC 2334: World Cultures III and a cross-listed Capstone—BIC 4389/PHI 3320: Philosophical Issues in Feminism. This Spring semester she will transition back to a 2/2 teaching load. She will teach two new courses. The first is a co-taught course with Dr. Anne-Marie Schultz in the Department of Philosophy titled, “PHI 5350: Graduate Seminar on Teaching Philosophy.” The other course, a course she designed and will teach for the first time this spring, is PHI 4v99/BIC 4389: Special Topics, Simone de Beauvoir. Philosophy majors and minors may also complete the course to earn credit for PHI 2303: Existentialism. Between 2020-2026, she directed or participated in 16 thesis committees (undergraduate and graduate) and directed an independent study. She also facilitated Baylor’s Summer Faculty Institute in 2020, 2022, 2024, and 2025. 

Dr. Wright's disciplinary specialization is aesthetics: the study of art, aesthetic values (judgments of taste), and aesthetic experience. More specifically, her work engages ontological and phenomenological concepts of personhood, including representations and experiences of selfhood–from cultural representations and self-portraits to autobiographical texts. She enjoys analyzing how theories of self (philosophical and theological) shape self-understanding and self-representation. The title of her 2006 book, The Philosopher’s I: Autobiography and the Search for the Self, aptly illustrates this central concern. 

Between 2020-2026, most of her published scholarship has examined the relationship between visual representations of woman (artistic and cultural) and experiences of womanhood. This analysis culminated in a published monograph titled, Athena to Barbie: Bodies, Archetypes, and Women’s Search for Self. She also published several papers on the scholarship of teaching and learning. A lot of her time over these five years has been spent giving professional talks and interviews, directing and contributing to student theses, and leading faculty development. Since 2020, she has published or presented: 

• One monograph (Athena to Barbie)
• One co-edited volume (Called to Teach)
• One single-authored journal article ( “Becoming a (Wonder) Woman”)
• Two co-authored essays in edited volumes (“Female Friendship and Philosophy” [forthcoming in March] and “Panther Mystique”)
• One co-authored journal article (“Personal Jesus”)
• Twenty-four unique presentations (all national)
• Five interviews (four national media outlets, one international media outlet).

Internally, Dr. Wright wrote five promotion letters, compiled two nomination packets and wrote an additional three nomination letters for Baylor awards. Externally, she served as a reviewer for eight peer-reviewed journals and university presses between 2020-2026. She became an elected member of the Discrimination, Harassment, and Respectful Behavior committee of the American Society for Aesthetics (a national position) in 2021, and an Ombudsperson for the ASA (Rocky Mountain Division) in 2024. I co-led Baylor’s COACHE Faculty Satisfaction Committee and subsequent working groups in 2019-2022. She served as a faculty advisor throughout a formal university procedure in 2025, and served on three administrator search committees from 2020-26.