Ashley Pryor is an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Philosophy at the University of Toledo. She is broadly concerned with restoring the contemplative heart of higher education and is currently working on bringing to light the contemplative dimension of early western philosophy (especially in the works of the Presocratics, Plato and the Stoics). A student and practitioner of Zen Buddhism for about five years, she is developing a course on Women and Socially Engaged Buddhism. With the support of grant from UT’s Center for Teaching and Learning, she will travel to Vietnam, Mongolia, and Santa Fe in the summer of 2008 to meet with pioneering women in this movement.