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Charles Barbour

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(Aesthetics, sovereignty, Marx, Carl Schmitt) Dr Charles Barbour teaches in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts. His research interests include politics and aesthetics, with a particular interest in contemporary political theory. Along with a number of chapters in books, he has articles published in journals such as Law, Culture and Humanities, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and Philosophy and Social Criticism. He has also co-edited, with George Pavlich, the collection After Sovereignty: On the Question of Political Beginnings (opens in a new window) (Routledge-Cavendish, 2009).

Diego Bubbio
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(19th century European philosophy, Philosophy of religion, Existentialism and hermeneutics, Girard's mimetic theory) Associate Professor Diego Bubbio has a PhD from the University of Turin (Italy). Before coming to Western Sydney University in 2012, A/Prof Bubbio was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at The University of Sydney, where he co-directed (with Paul Redding) the Religion and Post-Kantian Philosophy Research Cluster. He also taught Kant and Modern philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He was the holder of an ARC Future Fellowship (2012-2016) on a project on the notion of the ‘I’ in Hegel and Heidegger. A/Prof Bubbio's research is mainly in the area of post-Kantian philosophy. In particular he is interested in the relationship of the post-Kantian tradition (from Kant to Nietzsche) to the later movements of European philosophy, such as existentialism and hermeneutics, and in issues in philosophy of religion. He is the author of Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition (SUNY Press 2014); God and the Self in Hegel: Beyond Subjectivism (SUNY Press 2017); and Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes (Michigan State University Press, 2018). Along with a number of chapters in books, he has articles published in academic journals such as The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Hegel Bulletin,and Heythrop Journal. He has edited, with Philip Quadrio, the collection The Relationship of Philosophy to Religion Today (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011) and, with Paul Redding, Religion After Kant: God and Culture in the Idealist Era (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012). He is also the editor of Luigi Pareyson's Existence, Interpretation, Freedom. Selected Writings (The Davies Group Publishers 2009), the editor of the Book series "Contemporary Studies in Idealism”, published by Lexington Books, and the co-editor of the Book series “Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asia”, published by Rowman & Littlefield.

Chris Fleming

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(Mimetic theory, deconstruction, conspiracy theory, philosophical anthropology, philosophy and literature, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion) Dr Chris Fleming is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a Member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. He has written in the areas of phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, mimetic theory, deconstruction, and the philosophy of science. His work has appeared in journals such as Philosophy and Social Criticism, Parallax, Anthropological Quarterly, Public Understanding of Science, and Body & Society, and his books include René Girard: Violence and Mimesis, Does Religion Cause Violence?, and Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid. He an editor of the Bloomsbury series Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, and is the translator of René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974-1991.

John Hadley

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John Hadley is Research Lecturer in Philosophy in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University.  He was formerly a lecturer in philosophy in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Lecturer in Communication Ethics in the School of Communication, Charles Sturt University. During his PhD candidature at the University of Sydney, John lectured in the philosophy department and was a guest lecturer for USYD Laboratory Animal Services. He has published on a wide range of topics in animal and environmental ethics, including recent papers on assisting wild animals in need, animal rights extremism, the reporting of animal research in the media, and the ethical limits of veterinary expenditure. He has refereed for journals such as Journal of Applied Philosophy, Journal of Value Inquiry, Social Theory and Practice, Political Studies, Environmental Values, and Environmental Philosophy.

Mark Kelly 

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M ark Kelly was appointed Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and ARC Future Fellow at the Western Sydney University in 2014. His ARC project, 'The invention of norms: how ethics, law, and the life sciences shape our social selves' aims to show how the concept of the norm has shaped our understanding of the world, changed our society, and become part of our personal lives. He has authored three books on the thought of Michel Foucault – The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (Routledge, 2009), Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. I (Edinburgh, 2013), and Foucault and Politics (Edinburgh, 2014) – and published on topics in political philosophy, including a forthcoming book, Biopolitical Imperialism (Zero).

Alex Ling

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Dr Alex Ling is Research Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts. Alex received his doctorate from the University of Melbourne, where he was awarded the Chancellor's Award for the Best PhD Thesis. He has published two single-author monographs, Badiou and Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) and Badiou Reframed (I.B. Tauris, 2016), and is the editor and translator (with A.J. Bartlett) of Mathematics of the Transcendental (Bloomsbury, 2014). His principal research interests are in film and critical theory and the intersections between art, science and philosophy, with especial focus on the work of Alain Badiou, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze. His current research is on the art of scandal and the phenomenon of controversy in the 21st century.

Jennifer Mensch

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Jennifer Mensch is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University.  As a Kant specialist with interdisciplinary interests in the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Mensch’s research aims to expand the interpretive boundaries that have been long established for the philosophical figures of this period.  She has two large-scale writing projects underway, first,  Fractured Enlightenment. Tales of History and Revolution from Kant to Shelley, which works at the intersection of philosophy, science, and literature in describing the rise and subsequent fracturing of genealogical models for understanding historical development in the wake of Buffon’s Natural History, and second, Bloodlines: Philosophical Anthropology from Kant to Elkin and Coon, which situates Kant against the backdrop of German anthropology in order to show his long, though unrecognized, legacy in the history of anthropology.  In 2018-2022 she will be pursuing an ARC funded Discovery Project on the early history of German anthropology.

Christopher Peterson

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(Husserl, Derrida, animality, posthumanism, race, sexuality) Associate Professor Christopher Peterson is the author of Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity (Minnesota, 2007); Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality (Fordham 2012); and Monkey Trouble: The Scandal of Posthumanism (Fordham 2017). He has also published articles in a number of academic journals, including Modern Fiction Studies, New Literary History, Theory and Event, Angelaki, SubStance, and Textual Practice.

Dennis Schmidt

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(Ancient Philosophy, Post-Kantian Continental Philosophy, Aesthetics, Literary Criticism) Professor Dennis Schmidt, formerly Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and German at Penn State University, was appointed Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts. He is the author of several books, including Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Gadamer, and Klee (Indiana University Press, forthcoming), Idiome der Wahrheit (Klostermann Verlag, 2012), Lyrical and Ethical Subjects (SUNY Press, 2005), On Germans and Other Greeks (Indiana University Press, 2001), Hermeneutische Wege (co-edited with Günter Figal, Mohr-Siebeck Verlag, 2000), and The Ubiquity of the Finite (MIT Press, 1988).

Anthony Uhlmann

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(Literary theory, Spinoza, Deleuze, Beckett) Prof Anthony Uhlmann is the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (opens in a new window) (Cambridge UP, 1999) and Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image(opens in a new window) (Cambridge UP, 2006) and co-editer of The Ethics of Arnold Geulincx(opens in a new window). His main research interests concern the interrelation of literature and philosophy, and the nature of literary form. He is just completing a project examining Modernist Aesthetics, focusing on the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov. He is President of the Australasian Association for Literature and the Chief Editor of The Journal of Beckett Studies (opens in a new window) .

Dimitris Vardoulakis

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(Spinoza, sovereignty, democracy, literature and philosophy)

Dimitris Vardoulakis is Associate Professor in Philosophy. His books include The Doppelgänger: Literature's Philosophy(opens in a new window) (Fordham UP, 2010); Sovereignty and its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence(opens in a new window) (Fordham UP, 2013); Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka's Laughter(opens in a new window) (SUNY, 2016); and Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy (Fordham UP, 2018)  As an editor Spinoza Now(opens in a new window) (U of Minnesota P, 2010) ; and as a co-editor After Blanchot(opens in a new window) (2005); Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka's Cages(opens in a new window) (Palgrave, 2011); Sparks will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger(opens in a new window) (SUNY, 2015); Spinoza’s Authority Volume I: Resistance and Power in Ethics (opens in a new window) (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Spinoza’s Authority Volume II: Resistance and Power in the Political Treatises(opens in a new window) (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is the director of Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society and the co-editor with Peg Birmingham of the book series Incitements for Edinburgh University Press.