Research Teams and Lines

Project Members

Cillian Ó Fathaigh

Cillian Ó Fathaigh is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at UCM. His research interests lie in twentieth-century Francophone philosophy, intellectual history and political theory. He completed his PhD on the role of institutions in Jacques Derrida’s political engagements at the University of Cambridge (England), where he was a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Scholar. Prior to coming to UCM, he was a Research Fellow on the "Spaces of Translation" project, a major AHRC-DFG funded project, shared between Nottingham Trent University (England) and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany). He previously taught at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France), and has been a scholar at both Trinity College, Dublin, and St. John’s College, Cambridge, and an invited student at the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm). He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Interdisciplinary Centre for the History of Ideas, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University Milan (Italy).

Email: cillofat@ucm.es


Liesbeth Schoonheim

Liesbeth Schoonheim is a FWO junior-postdoctoral fellow in political philosophy at KU Leuven and a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in political theory at Humboldt University, Berlin. In her ongoing research project, which is funded by a highly competitive fellowship by FWO Research Foundation - Flanders, she develops a relational account of freedom that draws on Arendt, Foucault and Beauvoir. Her PhD, which she obtained magna cum laude, dealt with narrativity and subjectivity in Hannah Arendt, and was funded by a FWO Research Foundation individual fellowship. She is currently editing a collection on the contemporary relevance of Simone de Beauvoir’s political engagement for decolonial, feminist struggles and organized multiple international conferences, including the workshop “Public Space, Inclusion, and Postcolonial Theory” (October 2021). Among her recent publications are “Resistance: An Arendtian Reading of Solidarity and Friendship in Foucault” (Foucault Studies, 2021) and “The Productive Body: Rereading Hannah Arendt's Critique of Corporeality and Introspection” (Philosophy Today, 2019).

Email: liesbeth.schoonheim@kuleuven.be


Katie Pleming

Katie Pleming is an early career fellow in French at the University of Edinburgh. Her research reflects on connections between the moving image, ethics, and politics. Her PhD (University of Cambridge, 2021), explored questions of ethics, politics, race, and desire in contemporary French cinema. Her current research focuses on film sound, drawing on recent scholarship at the intersections of critical race theory, film studies and sound theory. The project explores the ways in which film sound is used to conceptualise forms of agency, resistance, and community for minority subjects. Her previous publications include ‘India Song’s Politics of Sound’, (French Screen Studies, 2020), and ‘Desire, Temporality, “Liquid Perception”: Deleuze and the Films of Marguerite Duras’ (Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research (Leuven University Press, 2019)).

Email: katie.pleming@ed.ac.uk