Associate Professor, Philosophy
- PhD The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Philosophy
- BA The University of Wisconsin - Madison
Dr. Marilynn H. Johnson’s research interests are the philosophy of language, philosophy of archaeology, and aesthetics. She is a Visiting Professor at the top Paris Fashion School, Institut Français de la Mode for the Fall 2025 semester. For information about the fashion and meaning conference she is co-organizing in Paris November 2025 see here.
Scholarly Work
Dr. Johnson published her book Adorning Bodies: Meaning, Evolution, and Beauty in Humans and Animals with Bloomsbury in 2023. If you are a USD student you can read the entirety of her book free through our library here. A related article on bodies and shame written for The Philosophers’ Magazine is here. Her book was positively reviewed by Julia Minarik in the British Journal of Aesthetics and by Michael Spicher in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. Her other recent work has been published in the journals Frontiers in Psychology, Biological Theory, the Croatian Journal of Philosophy, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and in an edited volume entitled Explorations in Philosophy and Archaeology. Dr. Johnson’s newest paper, forthcoming in a book by Oxford University Press, is on fashion and bodies in the work and persona of Taylor Swift and was co-authored with recent USD graduate Sydney Rios-Bruner.
Dr. Johnson received her PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York in August 2017, with a dissertation supervised by prominent philosopher Noël Carroll. Prior to beginning her doctorate, she received her BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught English at a lycée in the Académie de Versailles, France.
Working with faculty members in psychology and computer science she was part of the creation a new interdisciplinary and cross-college minor at USD in Cognitive Science that began in 2023. More information about the Cognitive Science minor can be found here.
Links to all of Dr. Johnson’s published articles are here. Videos of her presenting on her book can be found here. You can see her conference presentations and other events here. You can follow Dr. Johnson and find out more about her work on twitter, academia.edu, and philpapers. You can learn more about Dr. Johnson on her website.