Megan Craig is an artist, essayist, and Associate Professor Philosophy at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology and (with Edward S. Casey) Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion.
Instagram: @waterstreetprojects
What is your favorite sound in the world?
Rain, church bells, cicadas in the heat and peepers in early spring evenings, my dog’s sigh, my girls laughing or singing.
Name a trait, skill, or characteristic that you have that others may not know about.
I love singing and songwriting. When I was a child, I desperately wanted to play the saxophone, but it was too expensive to rent. I took piano lessons and taught myself to play a little guitar. I dated musicians and wanted to be in a band. In college, I wrote a bunch of songs and then gave it up for years until recently when I started thinking about new melodies while driving. I have been working on an album about Dante’s Inferno.
What is your favorite film of all time?
My favorite film is Stuart Rosenburg’s 1967 Cool Hand Luke, which I first saw when I was ten or eleven years old, and which instigated a lifelong love of Paul Newman. Recently I joined the Philosophy in Film podcast (Chris McTavish, Alain Beauclair, and Craig Nickel) to talk about the movie. I was worried that maybe it wouldn’t hold up after years of not seeing it. But I watched it with a notepad in hand and found it as moving, intense, bizarre, and beautiful as ever. I think when I was a kid (too young probably to be watching it), it was a movie that made me think about injustice, heroism, friendship, and one variety of scrappy, American resilience. One of my favorite scenes is when Luke plays Lalo Schifrin’s Plastic Jesus on his banjo after he finds out that his mother has died. Newman plays Luke as a classic Jamesian hero figure: tough and tender, poetic and raw. George Kennedy as Dragline is incredible and just heartbreaking in his devotions.
What are you reading right now?
I just finished Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, which is written in the most intricate, extraordinary prose, almost a cross between Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. I had the feeling reading it that I sometimes have when I read fiction in The Paris Review, a total fascination with a new approach to language and narrative that infuses me with disbelief and optimism. I finished it on an airplane descending into New York at sunset through a blanket of rough clouds. It’s miraculous how O’Farrell draws up next to grief and sits there without shuddering or looking away. It’s a lesson in how one might live with loss.
I just read the sweetest little book of interviews between Calvin Tompkins (whose “Becoming a Centenarian” in the December 2025 New Yorker is also a recent favorite of mine) and Marcel Duchamp, purchased at the Duchamp retrospective currently at MoMA (go!). It’s called Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews, and it’s such a good reminder of the spirit of play and the value of privacy in artmaking. And at night I have Philip Guston’s I Paint What I Want to See on my bedside table, because my life, it seems, includes a detour from and a long return to painting, and Guston says all the brilliant things that make me want to get into the studio and live there forever.
Who do you think is the most overrated/underrated philosopher?
Overrated: Heidegger.
Underrated: Toni Morrison, Jean Wahl, Mariá Lugones, Kate DiCamillo, William Kentridge, Cora Diamond.
What is your favorite book of all time? Why?
I love Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, William James’s Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience, and Lore Segal’s Tell Me a Mitzi. But my favorite book is King Lear. It has all the things: poetry, prose, plot, intrigue, love, loss, song. It has been my favorite since I took a seminar on Shakespeare’s tragedies with Harold Bloom when I was an undergraduate at Yale (and wrote a paper for him about King Lear and Keirkegaard). Bloom liked to read lines of the plays out loud in class, bellowing them as if he was on stage at the Globe. I love that Lear is a family drama, but it plays out on a grand scale. I love the wild imagination that went into putting Lear and his Fool in a storm on the heath, the way the play shows the slow and then all-at-once encroachment of age and dementia, the speeding up of time, the precarious edges human beings find themselves nearing and sometimes crossing without knowing or intending the consequences. Maybe most of all, I love the line Edgar says to Gloucester after Gloucester believes he has jumped off the cliffs of Dover: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.”
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest, not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form.
Jessica Castellani
Jessica Castellani had a unique high school experience attending Toledo School for the Arts, where she played in a percussion ensemble and steel drum band for six years. She earned her dual Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and religious studies from the University of Toledo. Her primary focus was “the Self” and the mystical experience of losing it. She earned her Master of Arts in philosophy from The University of Toledo as well, with a specialization in comparative philosophy, Eastern studies, and continental philosophy. She has taught World Religions and Introduction to Philosophy at The University of Toledo both in person and virtually. She is a member of the Buddhist Temple of Toledo, tutors students, and has worked in the service industry for over a decade. In her free time, she likes to spend time outside and with her pets, friends, and family.
