ABOUT SHERIDAN
Photo by Reese Moore
A native of the California Bay Area, Sheridan Hough is an author, philosopher, and poet. She grew up in Concord, California and East Brunswick, New Jersey, and spent her high school years in Houston, Texas. She has a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Trinity University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Kierkegaard's Dancing Tax Collector: Faith, Finitude, and Silence (OUP 2015), Nietzsche's Noontide Friend; The Self as Metaphoric Double (Penn State Press 1997), a novel, Mirror's Fathom (Mercer 2012), and a volume of poetry, The Hide (Inleaf Press).
During her undergraduate years at Trinity Univeristy, Sheridan edited the literary journal The Trinity Review, and published many poems in literary magazines. She also minored in Theatre, and wrote several plays that were produced by the Theatre Department (including Gilt Cages and The Death of Goll; Musical, with music by Bill Alves and lyrics by Mark Harborth, premiered at the Church Theatre in San Antonio in 1982).
Following a familial trail (grandmother, godmother, uncle, and father) to the University of California, Sheridan found herself studying philosophy at Berkeley, where she had the good fortune to work with Paul Feyerabend, John Searle, Gregory Vlastos, Bernard Williams and, of course, Hubert Dreyfus, who became her mentor and dissertation adviser.
After finishing her Ph.D. she spent several years teaching philosophy in the Honors College at the University of Houston. Sheridan came to the College of Charleston in 1996, where she fell in love with this historic city and her unique, eccentric inhabitants. In 2007 she became the first woman to reach the rank of full professor in the College's Department of Philosophy—that is, since 1770 (well, since the early 19th-Century, when philosophy became part of the curriculum). She recently held a visiting appointment at Colgate University as NEH Professor of the Humanities in Philosophy.
Sheridan made numerous trips to London, Cambridge, Copenhagen, and Malta while researching her first novel. She is currently working on her second novel (about the British stage actress Lillie Langtry's adventures in Northern California wine country during the latter part of the 19th-century), and on a third monograph exploring the structural and thematic affinities between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.
Sheridan married her colleague and fellow philosopher Christian Coseru in Venice in 2009. They spend their time between homes in Charleston and Northern California.
