Research Interests

What follows is a list of the primary research interests of the Philosophy faculty at Newcastle. We are keen to accept applications for our MLitt and PhD programmes.

If you want to work on something else that is not listed, please just tell us, since we have interests which extend far beyond those subjects listed here, and there are other philosophically-minded faculty members scattered across the university, who are not listed here.

More detail, including lists of our publications, may be found on our Faculty website and Academia.edu

Miriam Baldwin

  • Philosophy and Sociology
  • German Philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche
  • German and English Romanticism
  • Critical Theory
  • Adorno and Habermas
  • Narrative
  • Narratives of Hope
  • Identity
  • Transgender Theory
  • Sustainability
  • Fluid Identities

Shreyaa Bhatt

  • Ancient philosophy
  • Political thought, in particular the work of Tacitus, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben
  • Sovereignty, authority and legitimacy
  • The relationship between political legitimacy and emotion
  • Anti-Racism, neoliberalism and the modern university
  • Philosophy of Information

Tina Chanter

  • Contemporary French philosophy
  • Feminist and gender theory in an intersectional context
  • Art and aesthetics
  • Film theory and psychoanalytic theory
  • Antigone: Greek tragedy and contemporary appropriations of Sophocles’ Antigone

Lorenzo Chiesa

  • Psychoanalytic Theory
  • Italian Theory
  • Contemporary French Thought
  • Philosophy and science, especially biology

Jana Elsen (Associate Researcher)

  • Phenomenology
  • Literature
  • Translation

Michael Lewis

  • Deconstruction
  • Psychoanalytic theory
  • German Philosophy of the 18th and 19th Centuries
  • Animality
  • Biopolitics and Italian thought
  • Phenomenology
  • Neo-Kantianism

Sinéad Murphy (Associate Researcher)

  • Kant’s Critique of Judgment
  • Enlightenment attitude of ‘critique’
  • Hans-Georg Gadamer
  • Michel Foucault
  • Jean-François Lyotard
  • Theories of art and interpretation
  • The theme of practical reason

Stephen Overy

  • Psychoanalysis and the unconscious: Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari
  • Contemporary materialisms: Deleuze, DeLanda, Land, Blind Brain Theory
  • Musicology and philosophy
  • Philosophy of education and educational practice in philosophy
  • Aesthetics of popular and online culture (including cartoons, sport, food)
  • Performance of philosophy
  • Existential risk, anthropocentricism, AI, singularity, and general doomsday mongering

Adam Potts

  • Blanchot
  • Bataille
  • Sound Studies
  • Aesthetics (particularly the philosophy of music and 20th century avant-garde)
  • Existentialism

Andrea Rehberg

  • Post-Kantian European philosophy, especially 19th- and 20th-century German and French thought
  • Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger and their 20th-century French readers, including Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault
  • Philosophical feminism, especially Irigaray
  • Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Art
  • Schopenhauer
  • Philosophical implications of Freudian psychoanalysis

David Rose

  • Hegel
  • Vico
  • Modern moral/political philosophy (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Smith, Rousseau)
  • Social and ethical thought
  • Action
  • Cosmopolitanism

David Ventura (Leverhulme Trust, Early Career Fellow, starting January 2023)