INSTITUTE FOR DOCTORAL STUDIES
IN THE VISUAL ARTS
The IDSVA Visiting Faculty brings together major philosophers, artists, and scholars from around the world. These internationally renowned educators join students at residency sites and lead seminar discussions about the site's historical, aesthetic, and ideological significance.
Alberto Ruy-Sánchez is a Mexican writer (PhD in Paris University), author of 30 books of poetry, novels and essays translated in 12 languages and awarded in France, Saint Petersburg, Spain and Mexico. He is co-editor, with Margarita De Orellana, of the magazine and publishing houseArtes de México.
Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher and non-fiction writer. His work deals with a re-evaluation of reality as alife, subjective, and deeply shared. He teaches ecophilosophy at the Berlin University of the Arts and is adjunct professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. His latest books are Enlivenment. Toward a Poetics of the Anthropocene (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019) and Sharing Life. An Ecopolitics of Reciprocity (New Delhi & Berlin, 2020).
Webinar: Culture as Reciprocity. Towards Ecological Citizenship.
Margarita De Orellana holds a PhD in History from the University of Paris, Sorbonne. In 1977 she founded in France the Latin American Feminist Magazine, Herejías. In 1988, together with Alberto Ruy- Sánchez, de Orellana founded the cultural project Artes de México. Mainly a publishing house, Artes de México has published more than 400 books and pamphlets exploring the multiple Mexican histories and cultures that comprise modern Mexico.
Carmen Boullosa (born September 4, 1954 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. Boullosa has published eighteen novels and several poems.
Melvin Edwards is a pioneer in the history of contemporary African American art and sculpture. In 1970 he became the first African American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mel Edwards received an honorary doctorate from IDSVA in 2022.
Webinar: The Question of Africanness Part 2 with Mel Edwards and Curlee Holton.
David Webb is Professor of Philosophy at Staffordshire University. He is the author of Heidegger, Ethics and the Practice of Ontology (Bloomsbury Press) and Foucault’s Archaeology: Science and Transformation (Edinburgh University Press), and has also published on the work of Gaston Bachelard and Michel Serres. He has translated several books by Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, including The Transparent Society; Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy; and co-translated Belief and Religion.
Philosopher, documentary filmmaker, and video artist Giovanbattista Tusa is currently a Researcher in Philosophy and Ecology at the Universidade Nova of Lisbon. A Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy and Critical Theory in many institutions in Europe and the US, he is the co-author of De la Fin (Mimésis Visages, 2017), with Alain Badiou.
W.E.B. DuBois Institute for the Study of African and African American Research at Harvard University. Current projects include Ornamental Blackness: The Black Body in European Decorative Arts, a study of blacks in European decorative arts.
James D. Fernández is Professor of Spanish Literature and Culture at New York University, and currently the Director of NYU Madrid.His research focuses on the conversion of experience into narrative, whether in the genre of autobiography, or in family lore o fimmigrants that gets transmitted and transformed from generation to generation.He developed extensive research around the Abraham LincolnBrigade Archives, the most important collection of documents, images and artifacts that chronicles the lives of the women and men who volunteered to fight fascism during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).
Dr. Farred is the author of The Terror of Trump: An Essay for Ezra (forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press). His other works include, Entre Nous: Between the World Cup and Me (Duke UP, 2019), The Burden of Over-representation: Race, Sport and Philosophy (Temple UP, 2018) and Martin Heidegger Saved My Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and author of many books, including Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press, 2017). He has written for the Guardian, the New York Times, and Al-Jazeera. His latest book is Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). You can also find him on Instagram at @beingatlarge.
American art historian and curator of contemporary art, and director of the Temple Rome Gallery of Art at Temple University in Rome, where she is also a faculty member in the Art History program. Wasserman has curated numerous international exhibitions in public and institutional spaces.
Italian international artist, after many years of experience in the visual arts, she is currently engaged in the creation of site-specific installations and video art. Her work has been shown in Europe, United States, Central America and Palestine.
John Rajchman is a philosopher and a professor of Art History at Columbia University, where he has taught for the last 25 years. During this period he has taken part in many new critical debates as the art world became increasingly globalized, mediatized and digitalized. His books, writings, and catalogue essays in philosophy, art and architecture have been translated into many languages, and he has taught and lectured in many countries. He received his BA from Yale, and his PhD in philosophy from Columbia University.
Paul Armstrong is former Dean of the College, Brown University, where he is currently Professor of English. Books include Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (Cornell UP, 2005) and How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Johns Hopkins 2013) and Stories of the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020).
Ilham Ibnou Zahir received her PhD at Goldsmiths’ College where her dissertation explored the unsettling relationship between ancient philosophy and techne/the art of healing-medicine. Currently, she is exploring the concept of the giver of knowledge/wisdom, through philosophical problems in the intertwined subjects of theology, history, architecture, and craftsmanship.
Anthropologist, Academic Adviser at the Justice in Education Initiative, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Prison Education Program at Columbia University, Panourgiá has published on anthropology, ethnography, critical theory, art and architecture, critical medical studies, and politics. Recent publication: Leros. The Grammar of Confinement (2020).
Lecturer in Contemporary Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid, Basili’s research focuses on the question of power in twentieth-century thought. In Madrid she will lecture on Simone Weil’s critique of violence, based on her writings on the Spanish Civil War.
Jane Taylor is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.
World-renowned French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has written more than twenty books and hundreds of texts or contributions to volumes, catalogues and journals, including The Inoperative Community (1991), The Sense of the World (1997), Being Singular Plural (2000) and numerous studies on art, community and contemporary society. Nancy deals with the question of how we can still speak of a 'we' or of a plurality, without transforming this 'we' into a substantial and exclusive identity. What are the conditions to speak of a 'we' today?
Leading contemporary Italian philosopher and author of over two dozen books including And: Phenomenology of the End, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, and After the Future.
Sylvère Lotringer is Professor Emeritus of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University and Professor of Foreign Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Known for his work as general editor of Semiotext(e) and Foreign Agents, Professor Lotringer is a literary critic and cultural theorist.
Aksamija is an Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Architecture, Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, where she directs the Future Heritage Lab.
Tom Huhn is the Department Chair for the School of Visual Arts BFA Visual & Critical Studies and Art History Departments.
Hecker is an art historian and curator who specializes in modern and contemporary Italian art.
Elkins teaches in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. His publications include What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?,The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, How to Use Your Eyes, Artists with PhDs, second edition; and Art Critiques: A Guide, third edition.
Jacqueline Rose is a Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
Balibar is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University and a Visiting Professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
Charles Altieri is the Rachel Stageberg Anderson Professor and Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Hunter is Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Rhetoric and Performance at the University of California, Davis, and Professor Emeritus in Rhetoric at Gresham College, City of London. She has written or co-written over 25 books in performance studies, feminist philosophy, the politics of decolonial and alterior aesthetics, and the history of rhetoric and performance, including Critiques of Knowing (Routledge, 1999).
Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture at the University of Chicago.
Phelan is the former chair of the Stanford Department of Theater and Performance Studies.