Ø KEYNOTE INFO
MANHUA LI
Dr. Manhua Li received her PhD in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2019. Her dissertation entitled Le corps ascétique (The Ascetic Body) explores genealogy as a critical approach, and provides an account of the body as the milieu of ascetic practices. Her research focuses on contemporary French philosophy, 19th and 20th centuries German philosophy as well as contemporary Chinese philosophy. From 2020 to 2021, she conducted postdoctoral research at Fudan University in Shanghai. Since 2022, she works as Marie-Curie Research Fellow at the University of London, Royal Holloway College.
PATRICIA MacCORMACK
Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge. She has published extensively on philosophy, feminism, queer and monster theory, animal abolitionist activism, ethics, art and horror cinema. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Routledge 2008) and Posthuman Ethics (Routledge 2012) and the editor of The Animal Catalyst (Bloomsbury 2014), Deleuze and the Animal (EUP 2017), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2018). Her newest book is The Ahuman Manifesto: Activisms for the End of the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury 2020).
JOHN Ó MAOILEARCA
John Ó Maoilearca is an Honorary Professor in the Department of Critical and Historical Studies at Kingston University, London. He has previously lectured in philosophy departments at the University of Sunderland, England, and the University of Dundee, Scotland. He has published twelve books, including (as author), Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006), Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010), All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (2015), and Vestiges of a Philosophy (forthcoming 2022). John Ó Maoilearca works in the areas of Continental Philosophy (Bergson, Deleuze, Henry, Laruelle, Badiou), metaphysics (especially of time and identity), film philosophy, and metaphilosophy. He is currently working on ordinary forms of time-travel (so far with only modest success).
CALVIN WARREN
Calvin Warren is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Warren’s research interests are in Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Afro-pessimism, and theology. Duke University Press published his first book, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (2018). He is currently working on a second project Onticide: Essays on Black Nihilism and Sexuality, which unravels the metaphysical foundations of black sexuality and argues for a rethinking of sexuality without the human, sexual difference, or coherent bodies.
CÉCILE MALASPINA
Cécile Malaspina is the author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury, 2018) and principal translator of Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). She is Programme Director at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris (Ciph), and visiting fellow at King’s College London, where her program for the Ciph is hosted by the departments of Digital Humanities and the Department of French, in association with the Centre for Art and Philosophy. She is a member of several editorial boards (the Ciph’s book series at the Presses de Paris Nanterre and of its journal, Rue Descartes; Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities; Copy Press; and guest editor at Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications). Cecile Malaspina obtained her doctorate in epistemology, philosophy and history of the sciences and technology from Paris 7 Denis Diderot and her Masters in contemporary French philosophy and critical theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) in the UK. Her main interests lie in the normativity of concepts, especially with regard to the aesthetic and ethical implications of conceptualising contingency and uncertainty.