Associate
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, UNC
Chapel Hill
Member Faculty, Expressive Communication and the Origins of Meaning Research Group, UNC Chapel Hill
Faculty Associate, Center for Philosophy of Biology, Department of Philosophy, Duke University
Faculty, History and Philosophy of Science, Technology & Medicine, Duke University
Hire Date: 1999
Ph. D., The Johns Hopkins University, 1999 (English and American Literature)
B.Sc., University of Colorado at Boulder, 1988 (Computer Science from the College of Engineering and Applied Science)
Tyler Curtain is a theorist with the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in theory, as well as courses in science fiction and fantasy. He is Faculty Associate in the Center for the Philosophy of Biology at Duke University. He is a member of the Expressive Communication and the Origins of Language Research Group (ECOM) in the Department of Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill. Finally, Tyler is faculty in the Program for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Duke University. His research interests include philosophy of biology, evolutionary theories of language, linguistics, philosophy of language, and theoretical computer science.
Tyler has not been allowed to marry his life partner, Jay, for 12 years. The State of North Carolina recently decided that Tyler will not marry his partner next year, or for the foreseeable future, despite both being citizens of the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment asserts that "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States." A small portion of citizens of North Carolina, but a majority of its primary voters, decided to opt out of that part of the United States Constitution in order to use the Constitution of the State of North Carolina and the full force of its governmental powers as a weapon against a still-hated minority.