Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones

Associate Professor

19th & 20th century continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, aesthetics

Professor Jones received her B.A. in Philosophy and German from St. John's College, Oxford University, and her MA and PhD in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick. Her teaching and research interests include key thinkers and themes in continental and feminist philosophy (such as Kant, Nietzsche, Lyotard, and Irigaray; self and body, the sublime, sexual difference). She is interested in working with art and literature to explore philosophical questions and in the intersection of feminist philosophy with perspectives from queer theory, transnational feminisms, critical philosophies of race, and decolonial theory. Her current research takes Kant's essays on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 as a prompt for re-interrogating human beings' relations to materiality, natality, and difference.

Dr. Jones is a member of the Executive Committees for the Luce Irigaray Circle  and for philoSOPHIA. She currently serves as a 'Member at Large' for the International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP). 

Selected Publications

'Sexuate Difference in the Black Atlantic: Reading Irigaray with Hartman,' in What is Sexual Difference? Thinking with Irigaray, eds. Mary C. Rawlinson and James Sares (Columbia University Press, 2023), pp.253-277.

‘Thinking Otherwise with Irigaray and Maximin,’ in Thinking: A Philosophical History, eds D. Whistler and Y. Vassilopoulou (Routledge, 2021), pp.236-250.

'Dissonance, Resistance, and Perspectival Pedagogies,' in Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom, eds Ada S. Jaarsma and Kit Dobson (University of Alberta Press, 2020), pp.117-134.

'Kant, Hegel and Irigaray: From Chemism to the Elemental,' in Kant and the Continental Tradition: Sensibility, Nature and Religion (in memoriam: Gary Banham), Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, eds Sorin Baiasu and Alberto Vanzo (Routledge, 2020), pp. 146-170.

'Philosophical Métissage and the Decolonization of Difference: Luce Irigaray, Daniel Maximin, and the Elemental Sublime,' Special Issue of Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 5:2, 2018; 139-156.

'The Anthropocene and Elemental Multiplicity,' co-authored with Emily Parker, English Language Notes, Special Issue: Environmental Trajectories, Vol. 55. 1/2, Fall 2017; 61-69.

‘Active Matter and Vital Materiality: Between Irigaray and Bennett’, Special Issue of Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology on 'Irigaray and Ecofeminism', Vol. 46.2, 2015; 156-172.

‘Re-Reading Diotima: Resources for a Relational Pedagogy’, Special Issue of Journal of Philosophy of Education: ‘Re-imagining Relationships in Education: Ethics, Politics and Practices’, ed. M. Griffiths et al, Vol 48 Issue 2, 2014; 183-201.

‘On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again, and Letting Be’, in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, E. Fischer and R. Fortnum, eds. (London: Black Dog Publishing, September 2013).

‘Lyotard and Irigaray on Eros, Infancy and Birth: the Dissymmetrical Horizons of Being Between’, in Jean-François Lyotard: New Encounters, H. Bickis and R. Shields, eds. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

 ‘Adventures in the Abyss: Kant, Irigaray and Earthquakes’, Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy, Volume 17.1, Spring 2013.

 ‘Irigaray and Lyotard: Birth, Infancy, and Metaphysics’, Hypatia, Vol. 27 Issue 1, Winter 2012.

Luce Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy, Key Contemporary Thinkers series (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

Courses Taught

PHIL 156 What is Art?

PHIL 329 Philosophy After Auschwitz

PHIL 336 Twentieth-Century Continental Thought - Existentialism

PHIL 338 Philosophy, Race and Gender

PHIL339 Recent Continental Philosophy

PHIL 421 Philosophy Seminar (Nietzsche; Nietzsche and Foucault)

PHIL 721 Graduate Seminar: Kant's third Critique; Lyotard and Nancy; Birth, Death, and the Human.

PHIL 730 Nietzsche and his Readers

WMST 630/PHIL 694 Feminist Theory Across the Disciplines

HNRS 110 Research Methods

HNRS 130 Conceptions of Self

HNRS 240 Reading the Past: Body Politics – Women and the Political

Recent Presentations

"Wayward Methods for Unsettling Archives: Sexual Difference, Race, and the History of Modern Western Philosophy," Women in the History of Philosophy, annual conference of the Society for Women in Philosophy UK, hosted by Stirling University, January 2021.

"Art for Earthlings: Philosophy and Art in an Age of Environmental Crisis," Philosophy Saturdays: a Public Philosophy series hosted by the Philosophy Department at Salisbury University, MA, with support from the Whiting Foundation; SU Galleries Downtown, November 2018. 

"'Lose your mother, always'? Re-interrogating the horizons of sexuate difference with Spillers, Hartman, and Sharpe," invited plenaryHorizons of Sexuate Difference: Scholarship on or Inspired by the Work of Luce Irigaray, 9th Conference of The Luce Irigaray Circle, Brock University, Canada, June 2018. 

Living with Contingency - A Response to Sue Wrbican’s ‘Well Past the Echo” Invited public talk, Greater Reston Arts Center, October 2017, to accompany an exhibition of new work by artist and George Mason Professor and Director of Photography, Sue Wrbican: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=y4vKleFOFcw&feature=youtu.be