Sarah Robins
Associate Professor
// Philosophy
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Associate Professor
// Cornerstone
Faculty
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Sarah Robins’ research focuses on memory, a topic through which she explores a range of issues in philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. She is particularly interested in the concept of the memory trace, or engram, and the role it plays in both everyday and scientific thinking about remembering. Robins has published in a range of venues in philosophy and cognitive science, including Philosophical Studies, Philosophy of Science, Wires Cognitive Science, Philosophical Psychology, Synthese, Minds & Machines, and Child Development. Beyond memory, Robins has interests in mechanistic explanation, tacit knowledge, and cognitive ontology.
Robins is a founding member of PHOMO, the philosophy of memory organization. She has served on the PHOMO steering committee since its inception in 2017 and co-organized its 3rd biannual meeting, Issues in Philosophy of Memory, in 2022. Robins is also President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
Active interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration is important to Robins’ research and vision for philosophy. While earning her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis, Robins was an active member of Rebecca Treiman’s Reading and Language Lab. Robins has been a visiting scholar at the Roman Institute for Philosophy of Science at Western University, Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp, and the Centre for Philosophy of Memory at the University of Grenoble. She is a regular contributor to interdisciplinary conferences and workshops and uses this range of experiences to inform her roles on the editorial boards of Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Psychology, and Memory Studies.
Prior to joining Purdue in 2023, Robins spent 10 years at the University of Kansas as an assistant and associate professor in philosophy, with affiliation to the Cognitive and Brain Sciences Ph.D. program. Before that, Robins spent a year as an assistant professor at the University of Texas, El Paso. Beyond philosophy, Robins enjoys reading novels (especially mystery novels) and vegetable gardening.