POLSON brings together an international team of researchers located across 3 continents (Europe, North America, Latin America), 9 countries (Belgium, Chile, England, France, Germany, Portugal, Scotland, Spain, and USA), and the following institutions: KU Leuven (Belgium), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile), King’s College London and Royal Holloway–University of London (England), University of Paris VII–Diderot (France), Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam (Germany), University of Lisbon (Portugal), University of Dundee (Scotland), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), San Francisco State University and University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (USA).

 

Principal Investigator

GAVIN RAE is Associate Professor in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He specializes in post-Kantian philosophy, with particular emphasis on ethics, ontology, psychoanalytic theory, and political theory. He is the author of over 70 journal articles,  7 monographs, the most recent of which are Questioning Sexuality: From Psychoanalysis to Gender Theory and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming), Poststructuralist Agency: The Subject in Twentieth-Century Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Critiquing Sovereign Violence (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and the co-editor of 3 edited collections (with Emma Ingala), including, the most recent, Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics (Routledge, 2021).

 

Research Team Members

KENNAN FERGUSON is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (UWM), USA, and co-editor of the journal Theory and Event, published by John Hopkins University Press (5 years), the Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at UWM (2 years), and Chair of the Foundations of Political Theory for the American Political Science association (4 years). He specializes in political theory, with particular attention to questions of pluralism, epistemology, and authority. He is the author of over 50 journal articles, 4 monographs, the most recent of which are Political Cookbooks (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2020) and All in the Family: On Community and Incommensurability (Duke University Press: 2013), and the editor of the The Big No (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2021); After Capitalism, with Patricia Petro (Rutgers University Press: 2016); and the 8-volume Encyclopedia of Political Theory, with Michael Gibbons, Diana Coole, and Elisabeth Ellis (Wiley-Blackwell: 2014).

 

SACHA GOLOB is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London (KCL), England, and the Co-Editor of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy (SJR Q1). He specializes in modern French and German Philosophy, focusing particularly on Ethics and Philosophy of Mind. He is the author of Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and the co-editor of the Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2018), as well as over 40 articles and book chapters on Kant, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Foucault in journals including Mind (SJR Q1), European Journal of Philosophy (SJR Q1), International Journal of Philosophical Studies (SJR Q2), Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Journal of Nietzsche Studies (SJR Q2), Kantian Review (SJR Q1), and in collections by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press.

 

JAMES MARTEL is Professor of Political Theory at San Francisco State University, USA. He specializes in postfoundational theory, critical theory, and ethics. He is the author of over 70 articles and book chapters, 7 books—Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead (Amherst College Press, 2018); The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke University Press, 2017); The One and Only Law: Walter Benjamin and the Second Commandment (University of Michigan Press, 2014); Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (Routledge, 2011); Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory (University of Michigan Press, 2011); Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (Columbia University Press, 2007); and Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (Routledge, 2001)—and is the co-editor with Jimmy Casas Klausen of How Not to Be Governed: Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left (Palgrave, 2011).

 

MONIQUE DAVID-MÉNARD is Professor of Philosophy at Université de Paris VII–Diderot, France. She is the co-founder of the International Society for Psychoanalysis and Philosophy and has been invited to teach at a wide number variety of universities, including Ruhr University (Germany), Diego Portalés, Santiago de Chile, Universidad de Chile (Chile), Universidad de Sao Paulo (Brazil), UNAM (Mexico), as well as Columbia University (USA). She specializes in feminist and psychoanalytic theory and has published books with Cornell University Press, Ithaca University Press, Presses universitaires de France, and Vrin, as well as over 150 articles, book chapters, and other shorter works in English, French, German, and Portuguese.

 

NATHAN WIDDER is Professor of Political Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), England. His research has focused on questions of identity, power, knowledge, and representation, which he has approached through the study of works in contemporary post-Hegelian and post-Nietzsche thought, psychoanalysis, and both major and marginal figures in ancient, early Christian, and medieval philosophy. In addition to over 40 journal articles, book chapters, and other shorter publications, he is author of Genealogies of Difference (University of Illinois Press, 2002), Reflections on Time and Politics (Penn State University Press, 2008), and Political Theory after Deleuze (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012).

 

VALERIA CAMPOS SALVATERRA is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. She specializes in 20th century philosophy, with particular emphasis on poststructuralism, political theory, and violence. She has published over 30 journal articles and book chapters and is the author of three monographs (in Spanish) published by Prometeo (Argentina), Metales pesados and Pólvora (Chile).

 

CAROLYN J. EICHNER is Associate Professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (UWM, USA). She has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University (2015–2016); President of the Western Society for French History (2014–2015); Collaborating Editor of Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires since 1820 (2015–2018); Empire Section Editor of Women, Internationalisms, & Gender (2014); and Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA (2020–2021). She works at the intersection of postcolonial theory and women’s and gender studies and is the author of 3 monographs—Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (Indiana University Press, 2004), translated as Franchir les barricades: Les femmes dans la Commune de Paris (Editions de la Sorbonne, 2020); A Brief History of the Paris Commune (forthcoming Rutgers University Press, 2021); and Feminism’s Empire (under final review, Cornell University Press)—and various articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries published in English and French.

 

EMMA INGALA is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Spain. She specializes in post-structuralist thought, political anthropology, feminism, and psychoanalysis. She is the co-editor (with Gavin Rae) of the volumes Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics (Routledge, 2021), The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (Routledge: 2019), and Subjectivity and the Political: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge: 2018), as well as book chapters published by Beauchesne (France), Bloomsbury, and Edinburgh University Press (UK), and numerous articles published in international journals including Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, Daimon, Ideas y Valores, Isegoria, and Literature and Religion. She has also been an invited Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

 

HANNAH RICHTER is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sussex, England. Her research seeks to develop innovative pathways for continental philosophy and critical political theory, particularly through links to systems and complexity theory as well as at the intersection of non-Western thought and anti-colonial resistance. Her work has been published in International Political Sociology (SJR Q1), the European Journal of Social Theory (SJR Q1), the European Journal of Political Theory (SJR Q1), and Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (SJR Q2). She is currently finalising two book projects, the monograph The Politics of Orientation: Deleuze meets Luhmann (State University of New York Press, 2024) and the co-authored book (with Elisa Randazzo) Wither the Anthropocene: Ecological Universalism and the Extinction of Political Action (under contract with Bloomsbury).

 

ASHLEY WOODWARD is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee, Scotland. He is a member of the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy, the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy (Australia), and an editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. His research concerns contemporary continental philosophy, especially in the areas of philosophy of art and philosophy of information, and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-François Lyotard. Besides over 60 journal articles and book chapters, he is the author of Nihilism in Postmodernity: Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo (Davies Group: 2009); Understanding Nietzscheanism (Acumen: 2011); Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition (Edinburgh University Press: 2016) and the editor, with Graham Jones, of Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film (Edinburgh University Press: 2017).

 

ROSINE KELZ is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam (Germany), having previously been an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA (2016–2018). She specializes in ethics, social and political philosophy, and science and technology studies. She is the author of The Non-sovereign Self, Responsibility, and Otherness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), as well as several book chapters and articles published for example in Body and Society (SJR Q1), Sustainability Science (SJR Q1), and BioSocieties (SJR Q2). 

 

RAMON MACHO is a Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. He specializes in philosophical anthropology and contemporary French philosophy. His PhD dissertation, completed at the University of Strasbourg, analyzed the evolution of Jacques Derrida's relationship to Hegel's philosophy. He was previously an élève of the École Normale Supérieure (International Selection, 2014). 

 

RICARDO MENDOZA-CANALES is FCT Junior Researcher at the Centre of Philosophy, University of Lisbon, Portugal, where he leads the Practical Philosophy Research Group (Praxis-CFUL). He specializes in social philosophy, with particular emphasis on critical theory. He has authored 3 monographs published by RBA (Spain), Georg Olms (Germany, forthcoming) and Plaza & Valdés (Spain, forthcoming); edited 2 special issues (Anuario Filosófico and Enrahonar); and published 9 journal articles, 4 book chapters, and 5 book reviews.

 

 

LIESBETH SCHOONHEIM is postdoctoral researcher in the research and teaching area "Theory of Politics" at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Previously, she was a junior postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at KU Leuven, Belgium. She also held an appointment as a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam (Holland), where she taught in political and social philosophy, ethics, and the relation of both disciplines to literature. Her PhD, which she obtained in 2018  (magna cum laude) from KU Leuven, was funded by an FWO PhD-fellowship. Her dissertation, entitled ‘The Limits of Tragedy. Arendt’s Philosophy of Remembrance’, offers an Arendtian account of self-understanding—speaking directly to contemporary debates on subjectivity and agency. She has been a visiting researcher at Brighton University (CAPPE, England), DePaul University (Dept. Philosophy, USA), Oxford (Dept. Politics and IR, England), and Humboldt-Universität (Sozialwissenschaften). She is particularly interested in themes on the intersection of political theory, social theory and feminism. She has published on questions regarding resistance, political violence, historiography and literature, and corporeality in, amongst others, Foucault Studies, History of  European Ideas, and Philosophy Today and she has presented her work at numerous international conferences.

 

MÓNICA HERRANZ MARTIN is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain working under Dr. Ingala. Her thesis, which will be developed within the framework of the proposed project, works at the intersection of feminist and psychoanalytic theory.