Amy Allen is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. She specializes in 20th century Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and Social and Political Theory. She completed her PhD in philosophy at Northwestern University. She has received fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Whiting Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2024, she was awarded the Lotte Koehler Prize from the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt for her contributions to psychoanalytic theory.
Her publications include The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory and Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis. She has sat on the executive committee of the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association, and has been an executive co-director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, a co-editor-in-chief of Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, and editor of the series New Directions in Critical Theory published by Columbia University Press.