Active Students (as of Fall 2025)*
Undergrad majors: 165
Undergrad minors: 300
Undergrad certificates: 7
Graduate students: 24
2025-26 Student Credit Hours: 34,864
*All active students with declared CAH programs are included in the enrollment counts.
The Department of Philosophy shines in many ways. The department has award-winning faculty members who are active researchers and dedicated teachers, recognized for their expertise through dozens of competitive, refereed and invited presentations at regional, national, and international venues across the department’s three disciplines. Our contributions are broad-based and often interdisciplinary. Our faculty research, write, present, and publish on topics as varied as The Silk Road, cognitive sciences, Existentialism, Latin American cultures, metaphysics, logic, and more. We contribute significantly to research and teaching in artificial intelligence, technology, and the ethical and social issues surrounding both.
In 2025-26, the department continued its work in research and teaching excellence, interdisciplinary collaboration, and in developing community engagement. Our faculty have published in highly regarded venues, presented their work at national and international conferences and workshops, created new courses and programs, and contributed significantly to the university’s recognition as “Florida’s technological university,” while also focusing on strategic priorities for UCF and within our academic disciplines, including philosophy, humanities and cultural studies, and religion and cultural studies.
The department’s faculty contributed to student achievement in the classroom and extended their work beyond UCF in community engagement, professional societies, publishing companies, and in receiving awards and recognition both inside and outside the university.
Brooke Rudow, with a group of interested students, developed a student organization and department-led “Philosophy for Children,” bringing high school students and teachers together at UCF for its inaugural meeting. This initiative gives younger students, who may not otherwise have opportunities to study philosophy, the chance to visit UCF and speak with faculty and current students about the importance of philosophy in their lives. Several faculty members provided short presentations for this audience and engaged in discussions with attendees after the presentations. In addition, Rudow and Charles Freiberg presented the department’s work in the philosophy of technology to UCF Celebrates the Arts with a presentation on ethics and AI to engage the public in this work. Cyrus Zargar and Christy Flanagan-Feddon co-direct the undergraduate certificate program in Interfaith Dialogue, for which public-facing scholarship and content are provided in podcasts and lectures.
Philosophy faculty in humanities, philosophy, and religion are also highly active professionally, with editor positions in well-respected academic journals and in professional organizations and societies. Ann Gleig is Chair for the Program Unit and Board Member for the American Academy of Religion and editor of the Journal of Global Buddhism; Rudow has been asked to be an editorial board member of the journal, Philosophy and Urban Affairs; Zargar is Associate Editor for two Brill publications, The Journal of Sufi Studies and Islamic Intellectual Traditions; Jonathan Beever is on the Editorial Board of the Online Ethics Center; Lanlan Kuang is section editor of the Malaysia Journal of Music and editorial board member of the International E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences.
Faculty in the Department of Philosophy published five books this year (with several others under contract or soon to be published). Zargar published two monographs: Religion of Love: Sufism and Self-Transformation in the Poetic Imagination of ‘Attar was published by SUNY Press and Ethics of Karbala: Myths, Modernity, and Virtues of Nobility was published by Routledge. Stephen Fiore, as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Research and Application in Team Science, contributed to The Science and Practice of Team Science. Flanagan-Feddon is a contributing author of Experiencing the World’s Religions (with Michael Molloy), published by McGraw-Hill, and Knight, another of the department’s prolific authors, saw publication of the Malayalam edition of Why I am a Salafi, published by OtherBooks, a trade publisher in India.
Department faculty are also active in grant proposals and acquisitions, with continuing multi-year grants with NSF and Interfaith America and new grants from the U.S. Army Research Institute, Lockheed Martin, the National Science Foundation, Meta, and the Eurasia Foundation. Faculty involved in these new grants are Fiore, Beever, and Kuang.
Our faculty have presented their work at professional conferences and other venues of regional, national, and international scope and impact. Among them, Department of Philosophy faculty are recognized with named or keynote presentations at numerous national and international venues, and presentations at professional conferences such as the American Academy of Religion, the American Philosophical Association, the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the Latin American Studies Association, and organizations and educational institutions in Turkey, Poland, and more.
Our courses have expanded this year, with many notable inclusions sure to generate student interest and enrollment. Among them are Free Will and Determinism; Eastern Philosophy; Daoism, Cosmology, and the Body; Digital Ethics; Religion and Public Health; and Philosophy of Disability. New programs have also been added for our majors and students across the university, including a certificate program in Medical Humanities and the BA/BS degree in Integrated Humanities.
In other teaching developments, Rudow’s “Study Away” course, American Cultural Studies in Humanities, gives students the opportunity to explore the history, arts, environment, and culture representing the significance of U.S. national parks through “Exploring America’s Best Idea.” This program and course are gaining in popularity, hosting over a dozen students for “study away” opportunities in the Great Smoky Mountains. In addition, Stacey DiLiberto taught in Barcelona, Spain, in UCF’s Study Abroad program in summer A 2026, developing HUM2020 (Encountering the Humanities) for specific historical, geographical, and cultural content related to Spain and Barcelona in particular. We also have established programs for internships in Museum Studies and Holistic and Spiritual Care (with Advent Health) founded by Flanagan-Feddon. We are also developing a department-centered internship in law in partnership with an alumna from our Philosophy BA program, a local attorney.
Faculty in the Department of Philosophy received several awards this year. Brian Reese and Flanagan-Feddon won the Teaching Incentive Program award; Zargar won the Excellence in Research Award; and Kuang and Beever won the Research Incentive Award. Fiore won a paper award from the Society of Research Administrators International. In addition, Gleig and Kuang were promoted to professor; Flanagan-Feddon and Jeanine Viau were promoted to the rank of senior lecturer; and Jonathan Barker was promoted to the rank of associate lecturer.
Our students have achieved distinctions of their own, with students accepted into law schools, graduate programs, the University of Michigan, and the prestigious Witherspoon Institute summer program at Princeton University. Our students also completed several honors theses this year, continuing our tradition of representation of excellent students in honors education.
We are proud of the many accomplishments achieved by our faculty and students this year. Together, they reflect the department’s commitment to excellence in research, teaching, learning, and service, and position the Department of Philosophy for growth and impact in the years ahead.
