Shapshay earned her B.A. in Intellectual History from the University of Pennsylvania (1992) and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University (2001). Her scholarly interests focus on 19th century German philosophy, especially Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as contemporary aesthetics and ethics. She has published extensively on Schopenhauer's theories of sublime experience and tragedy, including work on environmental aesthetics. Currently, she is developing a book titled Degrees of Inherent Value: Schopenhauer's Ethical Thought, which presents a hybrid Kantian-Moral Sense theory of ethics that promises to interject a novel, less-anthropocentric option into the ethical-theoretical landscape. She has received fellowships from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and won the John Eliot Outstanding Teacher Award and a Trustees Teaching Award.
- Reconstructing Schopenhauer's Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare (2019) Book
- The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (2017) Book
- Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology (2020) Book
