Dr. Barbara Gail Montero
Barbara Gail Montero, PhD is the Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and Cofounder of Logos Dance Collective, with over two decades of experience in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of expertise.
She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and a former professional ballet dancer whose academic work uniquely bridges philosophical inquiry with embodied practice. Barbara’s research explores two distinct notions of “body”: body as the physical or material basis of the mind, and body as the moving, breathing, flesh-and-blood instrument used in running, walking, dancing, and athletic performance. She has been awarded research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Read Philosophy professor chosen for prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
In 2024, Barbara was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her project titled Things That Matter: Actual-World Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. This work explores metaphysics, focusing on what the world is actually like rather than what is hypothetically possible. She was selected as one of just 188 scholars, scientists, and artists chosen from approximately 3,000 applicants for this prestigious fellowship. Read Three CUNY Educators Win 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships.
Barbara is the author of Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind, which challenges the widespread view that thinking interferes with expert performance. The book argues that expert action is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective, drawing on examples from sports, performing arts, chess, nursing, medicine, and the military. The work was nominated by Oxford University Press for the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. Read The Myth of ‘Just Do It’ in The New York Times.
She coauthored Continuous Improvement: Intertwining Mind and Body in Athletic Expertise, further developing her groundbreaking work on the role of consciousness in skilled performance. Barbara also authored Philosophy of Mind: A Very Short Introduction, which was selected for the Oxford University Press New Year Reading List. Her earlier textbook, On the Philosophy of Mind, introduces students to fundamental philosophical problems through thought experiments and concrete examples from neuroscience and psychiatry. She also coedited Economics and the Mind with Mark White.
Before entering academia, Barbara was a professional ballet dancer who toured with various ballet companies. During her undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, she founded Ballet After Work, a company of dancers with a wide range of abilities, from absolute beginners to semi-professionals. Her dance background profoundly informs her philosophical research on embodied cognition, proprioception, and the aesthetics of movement. She continues to choreograph and perform, and recently choreographed for Notre Dame’s production of the operetta Candide.
As Cofounder and Project Director of the Logos Dance Collective, Barbara promotes dialogue between academics, artists, and the general public through multidisciplinary performances that blend philosophy with dance. Productions include Curved Spacetimes: Where Friedrich Nietzsche Meets Virginia Woolf and The Missing Shade of You: A Dance Dialog between L.A. Paul and Marcel Proust.
Between 2003 and 2022, Barbara was Professor of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2017, she received the College of Staten Island Dolphin Award for Scholarly Achievement. She joined the University of Notre Dame in Fall 2022. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University from 2001 to 2003 and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh from 2000 to 2001.
She was also a Visiting Scholar at New York University on multiple occasions. In 2020, Barbara was named a Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, where she provided philosophical grounding for the kinesthetic experience and appeal of dance and investigated its relevance for athletic performance. She serves as a panelist at the Helix Center for discussions on consciousness and cognition.
Barbara earned her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2000, with her dissertation titled The Body Problem and Other Foundational Issues in the Metaphysics of Mind. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Barbara’s research has been supported by two National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowships totaling over $100,000, an NEH Summer Stipend, an American Council of Learned Societies Charles Ryskamp Research Fellowship worth over $80,000, an Andrew W. Mellon Science Studies Fellowship, and a CUNY Book Completion Award.
She received the John Fisher Memorial Prize in Aesthetics in 2006. Her article The Myth of ‘Just Do It’ was reprinted in The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments. Barbara has published extensively in leading journals, including the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, Mind and Language, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Her influential papers include The Body Problem (2002), Physicalism Could Be True Even If Mary Learns Something New (2007), and Post-Physicalism (2001).
Read Does Bodily Awareness Interfere with Highly Skilled Movement? and Practice Makes Perfect: The Effect of Dance Training on the Aesthetic Judge. Read Q&A: Barbara Montero, philosopher, on the myth of ‘Just Do It’.
Watch Quantum Gravity (a song) and Parmenides (a song & dance).
Visit her Personal Homepage, LinkedIn profile, University of Notre Dame profile, PhilPeople profile, Google Scholar page, ResearchGate profile, and Academia page. Follow her on X.