Contemporary European Philosophy MA: Who teaches this course

This course is delivered by the philosophy department in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Academic staff are internationally recognised specialists from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), which was formerly based at Middlesex University, prior to its transfer to Kingston in 2010).

As a student on this course, you will benefit from a lively study environment, thanks to the wide range of postgraduate courses on offer.

The Faculty provides a vibrant and forward-thinking environment for study with:

• courses designed in collaboration with industry professionals – keeping you up to date with the latest developments;
• established connections with the London arts and media scene – with a range of guest speakers, professors and lecturers visiting the University; and
• committed and enthusiastic staff – many of whom are expert practitioners as well as leading academics and researchers.

The Faculty's combination of academics and practitioners makes it a unique environment in which to further your studies and your career.

Where is the Faculty based? Most students are based at the University's Penrhyn Road campus, with our music courses taught at the Kingston Hill campus.

Eric Alliez

Eric is one of the leading French philosophers of his generation. Previously the Chair of Aesthetics at the Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste, Vienna (2000–03), he is currently completing the third and final volume of his 'Aesthetic Project' on 20th century French art, Défaire l'image [Undoing the Image]. He is known internationally for his work on the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde and philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. He is co-ordinating the translation of two of Guattari's books into English, along with an accompanying volume of critical essays.

Etienne Balibar

Etienne will join the CRMEP in the spring of 2013. His interests range widely across general philosophy, and include political philosophy, Marxism, the epistemology of the social sciences, political anthropology, and contemporary French philosophy. His many books include Spinoza and Politics (1995), Race, Nation, Class (1998), The Philosophy of Marx (1993), La Crainte des masses (1997), Politics and the Other Scene (2002), French Philosophy after 1945 (ed., 2011), and Citoyen Sujet (2011).

Howard Caygill

Professor Howard Caygill worked in the History Department at Goldsmiths before joining Kingston in January 2010. His research interests include contemporary European philosophy, recent Italian philosophy, Kant, ethics, theories of resistance, Benjamin, Levinas, Kafka, philosophy and psychiatry. He is the author of Levinas and the Political (2002), Walter Benjamin (1998), and A Kant Dictionary (1995), and he is currently completing books on Kafka and on resistance.

Peter Hallward

Peter Hallward is professor of Modern European Philosophy. After working in the French Department at King's College London 1999–2004, Peter joined the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in 2005. His research interests include political philosophy, recent and contemporary French Philosophy (especially Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Rancière), contemporary critical theory, politics and postcolonial theory. His books include Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment (2007), Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (2006), Badiou: A Subject to Truth (2003), and Absolutely Postcolonial (2001). He is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective, and is currently working on a project entitled 'The Will of the People'.

Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabou worked in the Philosophy Department at Paris X and as a visiting lecturer in several universities in the US before joining Kingston in July 2010. Her research interests include contemporary French philosophy, Hegel, philosophy and science, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, plasticity, sexual difference, neuroscience, life, affect. Her many books include The Future of Hegel (2004), What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2009), Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (2009), Changing Difference (2011) and The New Wounded (2012), and she is currently working on a book about the meaning of life as a political and scientific concept.

Peter Osborne

Research interests: Kant, Hegel, Marx and first generation Frankfurt critical theory (Adorno and Benjamin); temporality and philosophy of history; transdisciplinarity; abstraction; aesthetics, art theory and cultural theory (especially, the conceptual basis of global comparativism and the ontology of contemporary art); philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis.

Current projects: Monograph: Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (contracted to verso, for publication 2012) AHRC Research Project, 2011–13: Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities (with Eric Alliez and Stella Sandford).

Books: The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso, 1995; 2011); Philosophy in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2000); Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002); Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (ed., 3 Volumes, Routledge, 2005); Marx (Granta, 2005; Norton in USA); El arte más allá de la estética: Ensayos filosóficos sobre el arte contemporáneo (CENDEAC, 2010).

Member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy (1983 onwards).

Stella Sandford

Stella Sandford is one of the leading feminist philosophers in Britain. She works on philosophy of sex and gender, 20th- century French philosophy and psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is Plato and Sex (2010). She has also published How to Read Beauvoir (2006) and The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (2000). She is currently working on an English edition of Balibar's book on John Locke, Identité et difference. She is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective, and her next projects are on metaphors of conception, birth and legitimacy in Kant, and the transdisciplinary functioning of the concept of sex.