Research Projects

Project Members

Gavin Rae

GAVIN RAE (Principal Investigator) is Associate Professor in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, and also maintains affiliate member status with the Contemporary Political Theory Research Group at Royal Holloway: University of London, England, and the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Before joining UCM, he was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Experienced Research Professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (2015–2019), while prior to that he taught at the American University in Cairo (Egypt) as an Andrew Mellon Fellow (2010–2012) and Assisant Professor (2012–2015).  His research interests lie in 19th and 20th century European philosophy, where he works at the intersection of socio-political philosophy, ontology, and ethics. Besides having authored over 50 articles and chapters, Dr. Rae is the author of six monographs, the most recent of which are Poststructuralist Agency (Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Critiquing Sovereign Violence (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); and the editor (with Emma Ingala) of Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics (2021); The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (Routledge, 2019), and Subjectivity and the Political (Routledge, 2018). He is currently also the Principal Investigator for the major four year research project "The Politics of Reason" (PID2020-117386GA-I00), financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spanish National Government.


Cillian Ó Fathaigh

CILLIAN Ó FATHAIGH is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. He is also currently a Principal Investigator (alongside Dr Katie Pleming [Edinburgh University] and Dr Liesbeth Schoonheim [KU Lueven/Humboldt University) of the Digital Public Space Research Network, a UNA Europa collaboration between UCM, the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and KU Leuven, Belgium. Dr. Ó Fathaigh completed his PhD on the role of institutions in Jacques Derrida’s political engagements at the University of Cambridge (England), where he was a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Scholar. Prior to coming to UCM, he was a Research Fellow on the "Spaces of Translation" project, a major AHRC-DFG funded project, shared between Nottingham Trent University (England) and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany). He previously taught at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France), and has been a scholar at both Trinity College, Dublin, and St. John’s College, Cambridge, and an invited student at the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm). His research interests lie in twentieth-century Francophone philosophy and intellectual history and his work has been published in prestigious international journals, including Paragraph and Derrida Today. He has also co-edited two volumes:  Derrida’s Politics of Friendship: Amity & Enmity (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and #NousSommes (Peter Lang, 2020).