Graduate Student Assistant
Education: B.A. in English Literature, Swarthmore College, 2014
Interests: Civic republicanism and its legacy, David Hume, Machiavelli, the Scottish Enlightenment, eighteenth-century commerce and society, politics and literature
Dissertation: “David Hume at the Limits of the Civic Tradition: Reading Machiavelli in the Commercial World”
Education: B.A. in History, Princeton University; master's work in Art History, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Interests: Shakespeare; Renaissance literature; lyric poetry; the experience of classical poetic meters; historiography; the influence of classical antiquity upon the post-antique world; counter-Reformation scientific culture; Michelangelo's sculptures; psychoanalysis.
Dissertation title: "Shakespeare's Songs"
Dissertation committee: David Wellbery (chair), Rosanna Warren, Richard Strier, David Bevington (deceased)
Education: B.A. in Religion and Black Studies, Swarthmore College, 2014
Interests: James Baldwin; Love Studies; Intellectual History; Religion, Literature, and Arts; African American Literature; Black Cultural Studies; Modern Religious Thought; Affect & Emotion; Audre Lorde; Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dissertation Title: “Talk of Fire, Invisibility, and the Erotic: James Baldwin, African American Literature, and the Theological-Political Discourse of Active Love”
Committee: Joel Isaac (Chair), Richard Rosengarten, Sarah Hammerschlag, Kenneth Warren
Education: B.A. in Philosophy, Vassar College
Interests: Ancient Greek philosophy and rhetoric, German idealism, psychoanalysis, Shakespeare.
Dissertation: "Plato's Phaedrus"
Joint degree candidate in Social Thought and Philosophy
Education: B.A. (Hons., 1st Class) in Philosophy and German, McGill University
Interests: Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy (esp. metaphysics, natural philosophy); Political Philosophy (esp. race and racism); Arabic-Islamic philosophy; Feminism.
Dissertation title: "Aristotle's Cosmological Ethics"
Dissertation committee: Gabriel Richardson Lear and Martha Nussbaum (co-chairs), Christopher Shields (Notre Dame)
Joint Degree candidate in Social Thought and Philosophy
Education: B.A. in Philosophy, Barnard College
Interests: Kant and Hegel; freedom, logic, and action
Dissertation title: "Action and the Actuality of Reason"
Dissertation committee: Robert Pippin (chair); Matthias Haase; and Christian Martin (LMU Munich)
Education: B.A. in Comparative Literature, Princeton University
Interests: intellectual history; political philosophy; hermeneutics; aesthetics & criticism; literary philosophy (Zhuangzi, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein); and philosophical literature (Melville, Dostoyevsky, Lu Xun, Kafka).
Education: A.B. in Government, Harvard College
Interests: Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, especially the Platonic tradition; political philosophy; Platonism and Christianity; history of natural law; liberalism
Dissertation Title: Law and Human Nature in Plato
Dissertation Committee: Gabriel Richardson Lear (chair), Nathan Tarcov, Jonathan Lear
Education: B.A. in English and History, Columbia University, 2015
Interests: History of political thought, political philosophy, educational theory, modern receptions of the ancients, American political thought, French and German Enlightenments.
Dissertation title: "Separated Powers in the Democratic Soul: The Liberal Arts and the Pursuit of Excellence in America."
Dissertation committee: Nathan Tarcov (chair), Joel Isaac, and Joshua Mitchell (Georgetown University).
Education: B.A. in History and Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2017); M.A. in Social Sciences, University of Chicago (2019)
Interests: American intellectual history, philosophy of religion, comparative mysticism, psychology of religion, ethics, modern Jewish thought
Education: B.A. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science, New York University; M.A. in International Relations and Development Economics, SAIS (Johns Hopkins)
Interests: Modern political theory; classical political economy; economic history, institutional economics; sociology of capitalism, critics of capitalism; Marxism.
Education: BA in philosophy and English, University of California, Berkeley, 2015; MFA in poetry, Washington University in Saint Louis, 2018
Interests: Plato; Leo Strauss; authorship; pedagogy; allegory; dramatic form; intertextuality; the lyric tradition
Education: B.A. in English, Tsinghua University, 2017
Interests: writing and/as technology; literary modernism, esp. Chinese, Irish, Japanese, French; STS; media studies; philology and modernity.
Education: M.A. (Hons) in Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 2014
Interests: Plato and Platonism in the history of political thought; the ethics and politics of psychoanalysis; Homer, Proust, and Ferrante; contemporary political economy; critical theory.
Education: B.A. in Philosophy, King's College London, 2009; M.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics of Health, University College London, 2011
Interests: Shakespeare, literary criticism, Marx.
Author of Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (Zero Books, 2011).
Education: B.A. in Comparative Literature, Princeton University
Interests: poetry, translation, German, Chinese, literature and philosophy.
Joint degree student in Social Thought and Germanic Studies
Education: B.A. in philosophy, literature, and intellectual history, Bard College Berlin (formerly European College of Liberal Arts); M.A. in Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure (Paris)
Interests: translation theory, 19th and 20th-century social and political thought, modernity, liberal education.
Education: B.A. in Classics, Yale University (2019)
Interests: Literary self-consciousness, English and German Romanticism, Greek tragedy & its reception, Kierkegaard
Joint degree student in Social Thought and Philosophy
Education: B.A. in Philosophy and English, Williams College, 2014; BPhil in Philosophy, University of Oxford, 2016
Interests: Psychoanalysis, Ethics, Kant, Modern Jewish Thought, Philosophy and Literature.
Education: B.S. in Mathematics, Furman University (2018)
Interests: unhappiness, human nature, love of one’s own, Plato, Aristotle, and Tocqueville.
Education: B.A. in Religious Studies, Yale University, 2008
Interests: Freud, Proust, Homer, the Hebrew Bible, mythology, tragedy, and dreams.
Education: B.A. in Political Science, BISLA, 2012; M.A. in Philosophy, Leiden University
Interests: Nietzsche; Plato; Heidegger and his students (especially Jan Patočka and Leo Strauss); ethics; modern returns to ancient thought.
Dissertation: "Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations"
Dissertation Committee: Heinrich Meier, Robert Pippin, Nathan Tarcov.
Education: B.A. in Philosophy and English Language & Literature, University of Michigan, 2010
Interests: Nietzsche, Heidegger, existentialism, deconstruction, phenomenology, Romanticism.
Dissertation title: Nietzsche's Death of God and the Nietzschean Body
Dissertation committee: Robert Pippin (co-chair), Ryan Coyne (co-chair), Jean-Luc Marion, David Wellbery
Education: BA in Economics and Philosophy, MA in Political Philosophy, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá; MA in the Social Sciences, The University of Chicago.
Interests: Political philosophy, philosophy of war, ethics
Dissertation: “Is War a World Apart? ‘Necessity’ in Walzer, Thucydides and Hobbes”
Dissertation Committee: Nathan Tarcov (chair), Christopher Lynch, Richard B. Miller
Joint degree student in Social Thought and English Language and Literature
Education: B.A. in Philosophy and English, Georgetown University, 2015
Interests: 20th & 21st Century Poetry and Poetics; Critical Theory; Psychoanalysis; Phenomenology. Conducting preliminary research towards a dissertation on the literary history and poetics of apologies and apologetic forms.
Joint degree candidate in Social Thought and Comparative Literature
Education: B.A in Humanities/Russian and East European Studies (distinction in both majors), Yale University, 2015; M.A. in Philosophy, University of Chicago, 2017; M.A. in Russian, Middlebury College, 2020
Interests: Russian and Soviet Cinema; Russian Silver Age poetry and prose; comparative arts; literature and philosophy; German idealism; Luso-Brazilian poetry and prose; theories of allusion and intertextuality; theory and practice of literary translation.
Dissertation: “Kira Muratova and the Struggle for Mutual Interpretability”
Dissertation Committee: Robert B. Pippin, Daria Khitrova (Harvard University), Françoise Meltzer
Education: B.A., Wheaton College
Interests: Kierkegaard, Ethics, Ancient Philosophy, Phenomenology and Existentialism
Dissertation: "The Role of Inwardness in Kierkegaard's Ethics"
Dissertation Advisor: Jonathan Lear
Education: B.A. in English and French, University of Oregon; M.A. in Humanities, University of Chicago
Interests: poetry and poetics; essays; film; nature and natural history; observation and attention
Dissertation title: "The Intelligence of Attention"
Dissertation committee: Mark Payne (co-chair), Rosanna Warren (co-chair), Lorraine Daston
Joint degree student in Social Thought and Philosophy
Education: B.A. in History and Economics, Dartmouth College; J.D., Yale Law School; M.A. in Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Interests: Self-Deception, Ambivalence, Psychoanalysis, Skepticism, Social and Political Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy and the Arts, Disability.
Education: B.A. in Philosophy, Université Laval (2015); M.A. in Philosophy, University of Ottawa (2017)
Interests: Ancient Greek philosophy, German philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, history of political philosophy, appropriations of Plato and Aristotle in German and Continental philosophy
Dissertation title: "The Possibility and Limits of Philosophy in New Marburg Platonism. Appropriations of Plato by Leo Struass, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gerhard Krüger"
Dissertation Committee: Robert B. Pippin (Chair), Glenn W. Most, David E. Wellbery, Francisco J. Gonzalez (University of Ottawa)
Joint degree candidate in Social Thought and Classics
Education: B.A. in Philosophy and Classics, University of Amsterdam, 2011/2012; M.A. in Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, 2014; M.A. in Classics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2014
Interests: Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy (esp. ethics and aesthetics); History of Science and History of Knowledge; History and Philosophy of Emotions; Hellenistic Literature; Modern European Philosophy (esp. Kant, Heidegger, Foucault); Lucretius.
Dissertation title: "The History of Wonder in Hellenistic Philosophy"
Dissertation committee: Elizabeth Asmis and Gabriel Richardson Lear (co-chairs), Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, Lorraine Daston
Education: B.A., St. John's College, Santa Fe
Interests: Aristotle's science and metaphysics; philosophy of science; history of mathematics, biology, physics & cosmology.
Education: B.A. in History, Pomona College; M.A. in Social Sciences, University of Chicago
Interests: History and/of philosophy in the early modern and modern periods, rationalism, German idealism.
Education: B.A. (Highest Distinction) in English, University of Virginia; M.F.A. in Poetry, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; M.A. in the Humanities, University of Chicago
Interests: intentionality, conceptuality, and musicality in 19th and 20th century lyric poetry; hermeneutics; phenomenology.
A founding editor of The Winter Anthology (www.winteranthology.com), a collection of 21st century literature and thought published annually.
Education: B.A. in History & Government, University of Sydney; M.A. in Social Sciences, University of Chicago
Interests: French political philosophy; American political thought; political theory.
Dissertation Title: "Unorthodox Adversaries: Tocqueville, Gobineau & the Meaning of Modernity"
Dissertation Committee: Ralph Lerner, Nathan Tarcov (co-chairs), Pierre Manent
Education: B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science, University of Chicago, 2014
Interests: moral education, philosophy of law, regime preservation and constitutionalism, philosophy of labor, Aristotle.
Education: B.A. in Politics, Princeton University
Interests: Ancient and early modern political theory
Dissertation Title: "Thucydides and the Athenian Activity of Listening"
Dissertation committee: Nathan Tarcov (chair), Matthew Landauer, Arlene Saxonhouse (University of Michigan)
Joint degree student in Social Thought and Philosophy
Education: B.A. in Philosophy, University of Chicago
Interests: Moral and political philosophy, esp. in relation to the philosophy of mind.
Education: B.A., National Technical University of Athens, 2008; M.Des. in Architecture, Harvard University, 2012
Interests: Early Modern Philosophy―Descartes, Spinoza, through to Leibniz―and the Philosophy of Biology, from Aristotle to figures of nineteenth-century Continental Formalism such as Goethe, Lorenz Oken, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Louis Agassiz.
Interests: history and philosophy of education.
Education: B.A. in English and Comparative Literature, University of Virginia, 2012; M.A in Religious Studies, University of Virginia, 2014
Interests: Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy, Islamic theology and jurisprudence, medieval and early-modern Iberia, North Africa, philosophical narratives, epistemology, Eastern/Arabophone Christianity, heresiography.
Committee: David Nirenberg (chair), James T. Robinson, Yousef Casewit
Research Fellow 2020-21, Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School
Joint degree candidate in Social Thought and Classics
Education: B.A. in Classics, Kenyon College
Interests: Ancient Greek poetry and philosophy, esp. Aristophanes and Plato; comedy and tragedy; ancient and modern intellectual history; historical semantics and conceptual history
Dissertation: “The Comic Critique of Philosophy: Aristophanes, Plato, and the Bios Theōrētikos”
Education: B.A. (summa) in Social Studies, M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies, Harvard University
Interests: Philosophy of art; Cinema (esp. ontology, classical Hollywood, postsocialist Chinese); Ancient Greek epic and tragedy; Historicism and historiography
Education: BSc Social Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science; MA History of Political Thought and Intellectual History, Queen Mary University of London and University College London
Interests: Continental social theories; conceptions of “society”; international intellectual history
Education: B.A., Bard College Berlin (formerly European College of Liberal Arts), 2018
Interests: Homer, Greek tragedy, Greek philosophy (the sophists and Plato), representations of Socrates, Greek classics in French philosophy, deconstruction and its reception (Jacques Derrida and Sarah Kofman), wonder in philosophy
Education: B.A. in Computer Science, Columbia University, 2019
Interests: American literature & philosophy; rhetoric; political trust; migration; Switzerland; and the history of journalism