Department of Philosophy

Office: B-3 231 Mackinac Hall; Allendale Campus

Email:  h[email protected] 

Phone: (616) 331-8119 (voicemail)

Quinn Harr is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University. Before coming to GVSU, he taught philosophy as a lecturer at Alma College (2021 – 2024) and Albion College (2022 – 2023). On a whim, one of his students at Alma started referring to him as “Dr. Q”, which very quickly caught on with other students too.

Dr. Q received his PhD in philosophical semantics from the University of Maryland in 2019.  His research focused on how we conceptualize and communicate about possibilities. In 2024, he also completed a Master of Library and Information Studies degree at Wayne State University. At Wayne State, his focus was on community outreach to, and library services for, historically marginalized groups, especially the LGBTQ+ community.

Dr. Q’s work in public libraries has transformed his approach to the classroom. Libraries emphasize civic responsibility and information literacy, and Dr. Q has come to believe that the skillsets taught in the college classroom are, at their core, skillsets enabling an engaged and informed citizenry. For academic skillsets to be applied in this way, however, students need practice: they need to learn how to reliably and effectively share and assess arguments and evidence with their peers. Dr. Q thus tries to facilitate what he calls a “conductor-less classroom”. In this model, students are trained to take collective responsibility for leading the classroom, hopefully as a precursor to their engaging in responsible democratic self-governance in society at large.  

Dr. Q’s areas of specialization include philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics, and modality. He is also working in the scholarship of teaching and learning. He has taught extensively in ethics, and has areas of competency in feminist and ancient philosophy.