Visiting Researchers
CAPPE welcomes applications from both early career and established scholars to join us as Visiting Scholars every academic year. Visits may be from a few days to several months: past examples of visits may be found below. To find out about applying to be a visiting scholar here.
Current visiting scholars
Lucas Garcia da Silva
Past visiting scholars
Dr Vanessa Freerks
Vanessa Freerks is a post- doctoral fellow at the St. Kliment
Ohridski University of Sofia (Bulgaria) working under Alexander
Gungov, who is Professor of Logic and Continental Philosophy at the
Department of Logic, Ethics, and Aesthetics. My main research
interests continue to revolve around temporality, technology and death
denial in western society.
Dr N Gabriel Martin
N. Gabriel Martin’s research investigates the role of scientific expertise, politics, technology, and other real social factors in shaping knowledge and its limits. He is currently writing a book on disagreement to challenge the assumption that only rationally resolvable disputes are epistemologically significant. His articles “What is the Epistemic Significance of Disagreement?” and “What does determining that a disagreement is not a ‘peer disagreement’ mean?” were published in Logos & Episteme in September and in the South African Journal of Philosophy in March, respectively. Gabriel writes for 3 Quarks Daily and The Philosophical Salon, performs at Stand-up Philosophy events in London and at the Edinburgh festival, and podcasts at The Vim Podcast.
Dr Selina Beaugrand
Dr Selina Beaugrand completed a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, on memory, cognition and knowledge acquisition in Plato’s Meno, and an MPhil in Philosophy at the University of Brighton. She taught philosophy at both universities. Her main areas of interest are Ethics, Epistemology, and Plato, with the occasional foray into Cognitive Science. The main focus of her work is an attempt to map the relationship between virtue, knowledge, and action – with particular emphasis on exploring the role that cognitive states may play in forming normative judgements and producing virtuous actions. She also maintains an interest in scepticism about knowledge (especially moral knowledge) and ancient forms of scepticism.
Dr. Spiros Makris
Dr. Spiros Makris is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece and Visiting Scholar at the Centre of Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics/CAPPE, University of Brighton, UK (Spring Semester 2020). He has published more than thirty Monographs and lots of peer-reviewed articles and chapters in collective volumes. Some of his publications in English are the following ones: Hegemonism, American Foreign Policy and International Society. Alternative Perspectives (Ėtablissements Emile Bruylant, S. A., 2010); Jacques Derrida and the Case of Cosmopolitanism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Aristotle in Hannah Arendt’s Republicanism. From homo faber to homo politicus (Annuaire International Des Droits De L’ Homme, 2017); Politics, Ethics and Strangers in the 21st Century. Fifteen critical reflections on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hos(ti)pitality (Theoria & Praxis, 2017); European Demos, Citizenship and Migrants in a Globalized World. Some Critical Reflections from a Habermasian Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); The Ancient as Modern: Leo Strauss and the Revival of Classical Political Philosophy (Philosophy Documentation Center in cooperation with the Greek Philosophical Society and the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie, 2018); Masses, Turbo-capitalism and Power in Jean Baudrillard’s Social and Political Ontotheology (International Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Science, 2018); The spectrality of democracy. From post-foundational political thought to the Levinasian ethics. Some critical reflections on the question of ‘the political’ in late modernity (Dia-noesis, 2019); Political onto-theologies or towards a political metaphysics. Some critical analogies from Plato to Jürgen Moltmann (International Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Science, 2019); European Integration or Europeanization? Europe at a crossroads in the 21st century: The civilizational approach of Gerard Delanty (Hellenic American University, 2020); The concept of terror in Jean Baudrillard’s social ontology (Dia-noesis, 2020); Hannah Arendt in the light of Saint Augustine. From political onto-theology to republican phenomenology (International Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Science, 2020) and Politics of Space, Strangeness and Culture in the Global Age (Routledge, 2020).
Professor Michael Wayne
Michael Wayne (January-September 2020) is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Brunel University. His research focuses on Marxist cultural theory, especially around questions of ideology, aesthetics and methodological problems concerning culture and materialism. Questions of class stratification, especially within a British national context has also been central to his work. As well as exploring these issues through orthodox scholarly modes, he also uses documentary filmmaking as a way of engaging these issues and speaking to broader pubic audiences. He engages in research related journalism and has published widely, most recently with Open Democracy and Counterfire. His books include Marxism Goes To The Movies (Routledge 2020), England’s Discontents: Political Cultures and National Identities (Pluto 2018) Red Kant: Aesthetics Marxism and the Third Critique(Bloomsbury 2014) and as co-editor (with Deirdre O’Neill), an anthology, Considering Class: Theory, Culture and the Media in the 21st Century (Brill 2018).
David Balogh
David started to work on his PhD in 2014 at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. His dissertation focuses on the philosophical problems surrounding radical leftist theory and practice after the Second World War. In this work I plan to analyse the notion of a “critique of everyday life”, as developed by Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist International, its connections to Western Marxism in general, and its relation to other approaches at that time (E.G. Althusser’s structural method, existentialism). He will point out that, although the critique of everyday life has weaknesses, it provides a highly effective tool for understanding the logic of late capitalism, and the crises of contemporary culture and politics. His project connects this perspective to some more recent developments in critical theory and anti-capitalist activity. On the theoretical side, he discusses the work of the ‘critique of value’ school, paying particular regard to Moishe Postone’s reading of Marx’s Grundrisse in his Time, Labor and Social Domination. He argues that his assertions, and those of other ‘critique of value’ theorists, present critical commentaries on some of the errors of traditional leftism that echo the arguments advanced by Lefebvre and the Situationists. On the activist side, David discusses the post-anarchist tradition’s efforts to develop a non-essentialist emancipatory theory and practice, and compares the Tiqqun/Invisible Committee’s activity with the classical critique of everyday life.
Professor Emanuela Ceva
Emanuela Ceva is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Pavia.She has held visiting positions, inter alia, at Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, St. Andrews, Montréal, Hitotsubashi (Tokyo), Hamburg, and Kent. Her research focuses on issues of value conflict and justice, democracy, political corruption, toleration and respect for dissenting minorities. She is the author of Interactive Justice (Routledge 2016) and co-author of Is Whistleblowing a Duty? (Polity 2018), as well as of many articles that have appeared in such journals as The Journal of Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy & Policy, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Philosophy Compass,Social Theory and Practice, Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Applied Philosophy.
David Jenkins
David Jenkins joined Warwick in September 2017 a postdoc research fellow on a Leverhulme Trust Research Project titled Investigating the Ethics and Politics of Sociability.
Previous to this he was a Teaching Fellow lecturing on Equality, Justice and Difference at UCL. In 2015 he was the Krzysztof Michalski Junior Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His work centres on problems in contemporary political theory, focusing especially on distributive justice, non-ideal theory and realism in political thought. He has published work on issues of solidarity within both ideal and non-ideal theory, the limits of the value of reciprocity, the power of occlusion, James Baldwin’s theory of recognition, the sociology of identification and the category of depth, as well three papers on unconditional basic income. Currently, he is at work on a manuscript (‘Bathing in the Multitude’) examining sociability in urban environments.
Wojciech Ufel
PhD student at University of Wrocław, where he studied political science and philosophy. His main research interests lie primarily in the area of political theory and political philosophy, especially in the context of contemporary theories of democracy, populism, and hegemony. He is preparing a doctoral thesis on deliberative practices and language in a hermeneutical perspective.
A member of research groups working on the process of de-democratization in Turkey and CEE states through electoral malpractices, and on migration policies in capital cities in Central Europe. Conducted scholarships at the Middle East Technical University and Charles University in Prague. Member of an Alternative Network for Alternative Academia, and of Polish Basic Income Network.
Janneke Toonders
Janneke Toonders finished her bachelors degree in philosophy at the Radboud University of Nijmegen. Her research interests concern mainly the field of political philosophy, for example, feminism and (other) social movements.
Yaar Dagan Peretz
Yaar Dagan Peretz is currently a Ph.D candidate at Keele University, School of Law, with a Keele funded PGR Scholarship. His PhD focuses on dehumanizing effects of technology in Asymmetric Armed Conflicts. Following his academic activities, Yaar worked between 2014 and 2017 as an attorney at human rights law firms in Israel, such as Tomer Warsha Law Firm, specializing in administrative and constitutional law, with particular expertise in Immigration Law and Refugee Law.
Yaar is a member of the Israeli Bar Association. He has developed expertise in International Law, Human Rights Law and Tort Law. He wrote dispositions to the Israeli Supreme Court on behalf of Palestinians who were denied work permits by the Israeli Secret Service and by Israeli police. Yaar also volunteered as an attorney with NGOs such as Arous Elbanar for Women, providing legal aid for marginalized Palestinian communities in Jaffa and HIAS, focusing on refugees and asylum seekers.
Dr Sara Diaco
Sara Diaco completed her PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge with a thesis in Ancient Philosophy. The dissertation – “Plato and Lucretius on the origins and development of human society” – argued that it is possible to connect the features of Plato’s account of the first polis to the structure of thought experiments and that Lucretius’ narration of the birth of society is based on the use of Epicurean sign-inference as methodological procedure that allows the poet to re-construct the events in human prehistory. It further analysed the ethical and political concerns of the authors, the importance given to communication and frankness by their accounts, and the role of philosophy as remedy to the problems of society. Sara is currently guest scholar at the University of Tübingen.
Dr Sabrina Veeting-Seerup
Dr Sabrina Veeting-Seerup started working on her PhD in 2016 as part of an interdisciplinary research group focusing on art, culture and politics in the ‘postmigrant condition’. Her research focuses upon Danish culture and cultural politics, more precisely how Danish cultural institutions and contemporary cultural products depict migrants and their descendants. Her main topics of interest involve diversity, representation, intersectionality, European cultural politics, the post-migrant condition and Othering-processes.
She is currently researching the representation of immigrants and descendants in cultural institutions in mainly Denmark, but also Germany and Great Britain. The start of this work is the current ‘postmigrant condition’ large parts of Europe find themselves in currently. She is preparing an article with Dr Mark Devenney, that will look into how neoliberalism assigns accountability to individuals. In the case of structurally discriminated individuals, this notion of accountability might lead gatekeepers and the discriminated to see the individuals as accountable for their own exclusion.
Bingul Durbas
Bingul Durbas has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on Gender, Violence and Activism. Her doctoral research project in Turkey explored domestic violence, including honour-based violence, and state responses to these crimes by examining the court’s interpretations of honour killings and the criminal justice system’s approaches and responses to such crimes. She is currently working on the women’s movement against domestic violence in Turkey.
Dr Birgit Antonia Hofstätter
Dr Birgit Antonia Hofstätter (2017) completed her PhD at the University of Brighton before taking the visiting role.
Her thesis – ‘The Fabric of Critique: ‘Lending Voice to Suffering’ in the Work of T.W. Adorno’ – develops the key concerns of Adorno’s philosophy out of his reflections on the aesthetics and practices of music. Antonia is currently preparing her thesis for publication and conducting research for a postdoc project on the topic of Übertragungen – the logics of translation, reproduction and transference – in Adorno’s writings
Dr Vicente Ordóñez
Dr Vicente Ordóñez completed his PhD in Political Philosophy at the University of Valencia. He is currently Lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy at Jaume I University, Castelló de la Plana, Spain. His book, El ridículo como instrumento político [The political uses of ridicule] (2015) has won the Complutense University of Madrid’s National Essay Prize.
The broad area of interest of his research focuses on the interconnection between politics, ethics and philosophy, focusing on whether and to what extent philosophical and metaphysical thinking permeates political theory and praxis. Part of this line of research has been carried out in collaboration with a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the Ethics and Democracy Research Group, University of Valencia, Spain and the Science and Technology Social Studies Research Group (GESCTP), Rosario University, Colombia, as well as with political parties (Castelló in Movement) and political activists and social movements (PAH-Platform of Those Affected by Mortgages [Spain] and BZV-Platform Impeding Evictions [Germany]).
Sybille De La Rosa
Dr. Sybille De La Rosa (April-October 2016) studied in Munich, Darmstadt and Frankfurt and completed her PhD dissertation on Appropriation and Intercultural Representation at the Free University Berlin. She is currently at the University of Heidelberg and is working on a research project that analyses the roles that protest and social movements play in the re-democratization of contemporary democracies. She has particular interests in alternative forms and models of democracy, as they are developed and discussed in social movements, especially the anti-austerity movements, refugee activism and postcolonial contexts.
Jurgen De Wispelaere
Dr Jurgen De Wispelaere (2016) is an occupational therapist turned political theorist/philosopher and policy scholar. He is currently affiliated with the University of Tampere as part of a research team exploring the design and implementation of a two-year basic income pilot study commissioned by the Finnish Government. His main research interests are in the philosophical and political dimensions of social policy and institutional design, with specific application to unconditional basic income, disability rights, procreation/parenting, and health equity and public health. He is currently working on the politics of basic income and is a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Basic Income Studies. With Gideon Calder and Anca Gheaus he is currently preparing the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children. He is an avid metal fan and remains undecided whether to nominate Intronaut, Meshuggah or Gojira as the best metal act of today.
Verbena Giambastiani
Verbena Giambastiani (2015-2016) has a BA in Philosophy of Language and a Master’s Degree in Theoretical Philosophy, both from the University of Siena. There her research focussed on the meaning of following a rule through Wittgenstein’s lens, and the distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal world in Kant.
Her PhD at the University of Pisa was on theories of perception, in particular the issue of sensation in 20th century thought. She is currently honorary research fellow in ethics and religious studies at Pisa, where her research focusses on issue of religion and violence and ethical responses to it, and on related aspects of the phenomenological tradition. At CAPPE, she is developing work on aspects of space in relation to violence and on ethical issues of animality.
Bru Laín Escandell
Bru Laín Escandell (February – March 2015) has a BA in Sociology from the University of Barcelona (2009), and an Ma in Political Science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2011). Since 2012, he has been working at the University of Barcelona on a PhD in Sociology as a TRAMOD researcher. His research interests are focused on political theory and economic history, theories of justice, basic income and the political economy of commons. His thesis highlights how modernization has altered the links between democracy and property that was characteristic of republican thought, mainly during the French Revolution and the pre-constitutional era of the United States of America. He is member of the Barcelona Metropolitan Observatory and the Basic Income Spanish Network. He also teacheshas been teaching Sociology and Methodology of Social Sciences.
Sabrina Frontera
Sabrina Frontera (January 2015 – December 2015) completed her Ph.D in Modern History in December 2010 and she has been working as a postdoctoral fellow (in Modern History) at the Social and Economic Science Department of Sapienza University starting from March 2011. Her research is focused on the aftermath of World War II and in particular on the production and handling of the “memories” of the Italian military internees (Imi) by either the ex-internees and Italian institutions, by historians and by the public opinion. She has collaborated with national and international research Centers such as the Auschwitz Foundation (Brussels), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Association of Veteran, Partisan and Prisoners of War. She is currently finishing her monograph entitled “The Italian Military Internees in Germany. The History of the Return”.
Frank Arnold
Frank Arnold (November 2014 – ) trained in surgery and research in tissue repair before becoming Director of the Oxford Wound Healing Institute, where he developed an interest in problem wounds and scars. He became a forensic practitioner at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, then initiated the Medical Justice Network, for whom he was clinical lead. He has written approximately 1000 medico-legal reports regarding evidence of torture and other human rights abuses and is a trustee of the charity, Medact. His current research interests include clinical collusion in, and opposition to, torture; and medical ethics education. He is advisor to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on medical evidence of torture in cases involving British citizens in foreign custody.
Althea-Maria Rivas
Dr Althea-Maria Rivas (February 2014 – February 2015) recently completed her PhD at the University of Sussex in International Development Studies. Her PhD thesis entitled, Revisiting the Security-Development Nexus: A Critical Analysis of the International Intervention in Afghanistan, draws upon 14 months of fieldwork in Afghanistan and post-colonial theory, interrogates the multiple discourses and practices of the ‘security-development nexus’ and challenges the claimed interdependence of security and development in international interventions. Her current research focuses on understanding local vernaculars and perceptions of violence in Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her research interests extend to issues such as international intervention, the history of humanitarianism, gender relations, governance and development and critical thought, specifically postcolonial theory.
Julia Boll
Dr Boll (2013 – 2014) visited CAPPE on a number of occasions during 2013 and 2014 from the University of Konstanz, Germany to discuss ethical and political aspects of her developing project on the theoretical representation of homo sacer – bare life, or what Judith Butler calls precarious life. Underlying questions include the following. (How) can homo sacer be represented on stage? How might theatre expose the social and political structures that produce the emergence of this social taboo in the form of refugees, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, unlawful combatants, displaced and stateless persons? Homo sacer tends to appear in contemporary plays as a victim of war and conflict or as a person or group of people who have been legally ostracised from, or have never been part of, the community (such as asylum seekers and refugees); as turned into homines sacri by official decree. However, this simultaneous exclusion and inclusion in bare life has remained largely invisible, the taboo status of homo sacer demanding to be shielded from the public gaze. What happens when this taboo is brought to the theatre? What happens when bare life is ‘piled up’ on stage?
Nolen Gertz
Nolen Gertz’s (30 April – 30 May 2013) research interests include applied ethics, social and political philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and aesthetics. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled “Rethinking War: Responsibility, Suffering, and the Future of War”, which is under contract with Palgrave-Macmillan, and has published related articles in the Journal of Military Ethics, Res Publica, Humanities and Technology Review, and the Review Journal of Political Philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in 2012 from the New School for Social Research.
Inge Mutsaers
Inge Mutsaers (4 – 15 March 2013) is a PhD-student in the Department of Philosophy and Science Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Having studied both biology and philosophy, her PhD research brings these areas of expertise together to analyse the relation between virology/immunology and contemporary biopolitics. Using the concept of ‘immunisation’ of the German philosopher Sloterdijk as starting point she studies the disciplines of virology and immunology and their bioethical and biopolitical implications.
Matthijs van de Sande
Matthijs (2011 – March 2012) was a PhD student at KU Leuven, Belgium. Mathijs is particularly interested in the common grounds between philosophy and political activism. His PhD research focuses on the relation between prefigurative politics, (political) representation, hegemony, and counter-representative movements (the Arab Spring, Occupy, populism, etc.). Drawing inspiration from various radical political traditions (Young-Hegelianism, anarchism, autonomism, (post-)Marxism), the central aim of his research is to conceptualise political practice from its own, action-based perspective.
Professor Kate Soper
Kate Soper is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in ISET, London Metropolitan University. Her more recent writings include What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Blackwell, 1995), To Relish the Sublime: Culture and Self-Realisation in Postmodern times (with Martin Ryle, Verso, 2002); Citizenship and Consumption (co-editor, Palgrave, 2007) and The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently (co-editor, Palgrave, 2008). Her recent study on ‘Alternative hedonism and the theory and politics of consumption’ was funded in the ESRC/AHRC ‘Cultures of Consumption’ Programme (www.consume.bbk.ac.uk). She is a former chairperson of European Nuclear Disarmament and has been a member of the editorial collectives of Radical Philosophy and New Left Review, and a regular columnist for the US journal, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
Visiting Doctoral Students
Michelle Luz, University of Pelotas, Brazil, Visiting PhD Student, Visiting Scholar sponsored by Brazilian Research Council, working on Populist Politics.
Guilherme Benzaquen Visiting PhD student from Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Funded by Brazilian Research Council. Working on Improper Politics.
Gustavo Guile: Visiting PhD student from University of Buenos Aires; Funded Argentinian Research Council. Working on Populist Politics.
Cecilia Ipar: Visiting PhD student from University of Sao Paolo, funded by Brazilian Research Council.Working on Post Marxist Theory and Populist politics.
Jishnu Guha-Majumdar 5th year PhD Exchange student from Department of Politics, Johns Hopkins (exchange with Adam Phillips) Researching systems of intensive American captivity bringing together analyses of slavery and prisons with those of factory farms and research labs. Drawing on animal studies, black and critical ethnic studies, and American history.
Current Honorary Fellow at CAPPE
Marek Kohn
Marek Kohn is a writer whose work focuses on evolution and biology and their relation to society. He has written for The Guardian, The Independent and the Financial Times, among others. He has also published a number of books including; Turned Out Nice: How the British Isles will Change as the World Heats Up (2010), Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good. A Reason For Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination (2004), The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science (1995) and Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (1992)
