Theory & Philosophy Summer School- previous guest faculty:

Kieran Bonner is Professor of Sociology at University of Waterloo, Canada. He is the author of A Great Place to Raise Kids: Interpretation, Science and the Urban-Rural Debate Montreal; McGill-Queens UP 1999, and Power and Parenting: A Hermeneutic of the Human Condition London: Macmillan 1998.  His essays have been published in Human Studies, the Canadian and the Irish Journals of Sociology. He is Researcher in Culture of Cities and The Grey Zone in Health & Illness, funded by the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Irish Social Sciences Platform. Kieran will lead a reading group on Arendt’s The Human Condition.

Maeve Cooke is Professor and Head of Philosophy at UCD and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her principal book publications are Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (MIT Press, 1994) und Re-Presenting the Good Society (MIT Press, 2006). She has also published numerous articles in scholarly journals and books, mainly in the areas of social and political philosophy. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Konstanz, at the New School for Social Research, New York and at Yale University. She is a former Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH) and currently President of the AvH Association of Ireland. She is on the editorial boards of a number of international journals and is co-director of the annual international ‘Philosophy and the Social Sciences’ colloquium in Prague, an important forum for critical social theory.

Patricia Cormack is Associate Professor of Sociology at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. She has published in social theory and interpretive methodology and on cultural representations of national and other collective identities in Canada and Ireland.

Jim Cosgraveis Assistant Professor of Sociology at Trent University in Canada. He is a cultural analyst who works in the radical interpretive tradition and associated methodologies. His current research focuses on representations of gambling and other forms of excess in the cultures of globalization.

Michael Cronin is Professor and Director at Dublin City University’s Centre for Translation and Textual Studies and was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at DCU from 2000-2004. He has published extensively in the areas of translation studies, tourism, travel writing, language and politics. He is currently co-editor of The Irish Review.  Michael was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in March 2006 and was granted Honorary Membership of the Irish Translators and Interpreters Association in December 2007. He was conferred with the rank of Officier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government in 2008 and has held visiting Professorships in the Université de Moncton (New Brunswick, Canada) and the Universidad Ricardo Palma (Lima, Peru).  

Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology and Social Political Thought in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex, and Editor of the European Journal of Social Theory. Gerard Delanty is an interdisciplinary sociologist with an interest in social theory and the cultural analysis of social and political questions, the comparative analysis of modernity in global perspective and in social change in Europe. Most of his work concerns in one way or another the implications of globalization for the analysis of the social world. He is the author of eleven books, many of which have been translated into several languages, and editor of seven. He has published over 100 papers on various issues in social and political theory, European identities, globalization, nationalism and the cultural and historical sociology of modernity.

Ronald de Sousais an Emeritus Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Toronto which he joined in 1966. He is best-known for his work in the philosophy of emotions, and the philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology.   Educated in Switzerland and England, he took his B.A. at New College, Oxford (1962) and his PhD in Princeton (1966)  He has contributed to and is frequently cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2005.

Elena Esposita, Professor of Sociology at University of Modena-Reggio, Italy is one of the leading representatives of systems theory. She initially read sociology and philosophy at Bologna, including, among others, with the professor of semiotics and author Umberto Eco. In 1986, Elena Esposito moved to Bielefeld to work Niklas Luhmann, on sociological systems theory. Her books include "Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft" about social memory and forgetfulness (2002) and "Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität" about the fiction of probable reality (2007). For some time now her research interest has focused on the processes taking place in global financial markets.

Stephen Guy-Bray is Professor and Head of English at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.  He specialises in Renaissance poetry, queer theory, and literary history. He is the author of Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic (Toronto 2006) and Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto 2002), as well as of numerous articles and book chapters, chiefly on Renaissance poetry, but also on Renaissance prose and drama. He is currently at work on a study of textual production in the Renaissance, tentatively entitled Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Poems Come From. He is also co-editing a collection of essays with Vin Nardizzi of UBC and Will Stockton of Ball State University called Backward Gaze: Essays on Queer Renaissance Historiography.

Steve Gaetz is Professor & Dean of Graduate Education, York University, Toronto. He is a cultural anthropologist with ongoing field research interests in urban cultures.

Mark Haugaard is editor of the Journal of Power and Chair of the IPSA Research Committee on Political Power. His research interests combine normative political theory and sociological theory. This includes theories of power, domination, freedom, nationalism, liberalism, identity and governmentality. He is Senior Lecturer at the School of Politics & Sociology, NUI Galway.

Tom Kemple is Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His research focuses on the rhetorical, literary and deconstructive dimensions of classical and contemporary social theory. His book on the melodramatic form of Marx’s political, economic and philosophical thought developed an interpretive method he is now employing to examine the allegorical structure of Weber's sociology of the cultural vocations of modernity. He is the author of Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse (1995) and editor of The Vocation of Reason: Studies in Critical Theory and Social Science in the Age of Max Weber (2004), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.He is an editor of Theory Culture & Society and is presently working on the translation and compilation of the complete works of Georg Simmel.

Tom Nenonis Professor of Philosophy and Vice Provost at the University of Memphis. He worked as an editor at the Husserl-Archives and instructor at the University of Freiburg before coming to University of Memphis. His teaching and research interests include Husserl, Heidegger, Kant and German Idealism, Hermeneutics, and the philosophy of the social sciences. He has served as review editor for Husserl Studies, as a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and as Director of the Center for the Humanities.

John O’Neill is Distinguished Research Professor in Sociology and Social & Political Thought, York University, Canada. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he is editor of the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences, and sits on the editorial boards of several key journals, including Philosophy & Social Criticism; Theory, Culture & Society, Body & Society; and The European Journal of Social Theory. He is the author of numerous books in phenomenology and critical theory and of over one hundred essays in international scholarly journals.

Stanley Raffel is a Senior Lecturer (ret.) in the Department of Sociology, University of Edinburgh. His books include On the Beginning of Social Inquiry (with Peter McHugh, Alan Blum and Daniel Foss, Routledge: 1974) and Habermas, Lyotard, and the Concept of Justice (Macmillan, 1992).

Henry Rosemont Jr. is Emeritus Professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland. He is a specialist in Asian and comparative philosophy and senior consulting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He is one of the world's top Confucian scholars. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Washington and an honors A.B. from the University of Illinois. He pursued post-doctoral studies in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969-71, studying with Noam Chomsky.

Brian Cantwell Smith is a scholar in the fields of cognitive science, computer science information studies and philosophy, especially ontology.  His research has focused on the foundations and philosophy of computing, both in the practice and theory of computer science, and in the use of computational metaphors in other fields, such as philosophy, cognitive science, physics and art. Smith was Dean  of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto from 2003–2008; he is currently professor of information, computer science, and philosophy at University of Toronto.

Chris Sparks is a social and political theorist currently based at Institute of Technology Sligo and The Open University in Ireland where he teaches sociology and politics, co-ordinates research development at the Creative Communities and Social Innovation Research Centre and conducts research into social uncertainties and the politics of fear. Previously he was located in London where he was Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of North London, Associate Lecturer in Social Policy at Royal Holloway College University of London and Quintin Hogg Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster.

Talia Welsh is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her areas of specialization are Continental Philosophy (esp. Phenomenology), Philosophy of Psychology, Feminist Theory, Aesthetics, and 19th Century Philosophy.