I am extremely delighted to finally have the chance to write on here that I’ve recently accepted a permanent post as a lecturer at the University of Winchester. I have now joined their faculty of Theology and Religious Studies.
My primary task will be to help establish their new Philosophy, Religion and Ethics BA, though I will also be teaching other undergraduates and postgraduates, particularly on their Death MA.
If you are a future research student and you are interested in working on a PhD in some of the areas I specialise in then I am currently looking for students. My particular areas of focus include 20th Century French Philosophy, Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Death Studies, Art and Film Theory and the Ethics of the Other. I have several other research focuses so please do get in touch with your projects.
I am now beginning a very busy period since I am working on module material for my new role. This includes exciting work on meta-ethics, the Shoah and representation, a module with a new take on the Rationalists vs. the Empiricists and one on contemporary theories of embodiment. In the following year of teaching I look forward to focusing heavily on Kant, Spinoza and the pantheism controversy, while also continuing working with students on philosophy and film in pursuit of my next monograph.
So, very exciting and busy times. Looking back, since my last update I’ve finally submitted the manuscript for my first monograph, given one of the keynote speeches at the University of Essex’s 17th International Graduate Conference in Philosophy focusing on pleasure and pain in Augustine and Freud (sadly I didn’t have time to get to Descartes, who was to be the focus of the talk and who I’ll have to pursue on this theme at a later date), I gave a special “rough guide to post-structuralism” class to a mixed group of undergraduates at Essex on Lacan’s move from the statement “there is an other of the other” to “there is no other of the other”, and I gave a short paper on Levinas at Winchester introducing myself to the department. I have a few possible papers lined up for the future but I’ll give details of them when things are more set in stone.