People

Linda McAlister

Professor Emerita

Biography

Linda López McAlister hailed from Los Angeles, CA where she got the acting bug at an early age and started working as an actor in her teens. She then went to Barnard College in New York City where she did a lot of theatre but majored in philosophy. After college she acted at theatres in NYC, Michigan and California but eventually traded her Actors’ Equity card for a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell and a thirty-year career in higher education as a professor and administrator -- first at Brooklyn College, and then at San Diego State University’s Imperial Valley Campus. She came to USF in 1982 as Dean of the Fort Myers Campus and then spent two years in Tallahassee as Special Assistant to the Vice Chancellor of the State University System.

In 1987 she returned to USF as Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies, specializing in feminist philosophy, the history of women in philosophy, and feminist film studies. In 1990 she became editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, which was published with the help of faculty and students in the Philosophy and Women’s Studies Departments for five years. She served as Chair of the department from 1996 to her retirement in 1999.

Once retired, she relocated to New Mexico where she revived her long-abandoned theatrical career. In 2006 she founded Camino Real Productions, LLC, a theatre company in residence at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. She was also producer and co-host of KUNM’s weekly Radio Theatre program, a member of the part-time staff of the Disney Performing Arts Center at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, a founding member of the Albuquerque Theatre Guild, and served on the Board of the New Mexico Humanities Council.

Read the New York Times posthumous profile on Linda McAlister.