Biography-Santa Barbara

Catherene Ngoh earned her Ph.D in Comparative Literature at Emory University where she worked on a dissertation “Affects of War: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and De Quincey.” She is also a graduate of the Center of Theory and Criticism (University of Western Ontario), where she completed her M.A. Her areas of interest include eighteenth- and nineteenth- century British literature, with a focus on Romanticism, read as a complex variety of poetic, aesthetic and affective responses to a wide range of political concerns from revolution and war, to the abolition of slavery and the death penalty. My research is informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives including: affect studies of race and gender; biopolitics; trans-atlantic studies; comparative theories of war, revolution, and sovereignty. Expanding upon some of the central concerns of her dissertation, her project at UCSB seeks to find in contemporary studies of affect and environmental humanities resources for moving beyond humanist interpretations of war.

My research concerns the artwork—in its relationship to religious traditions, the history of science, and the trajectory of left-wing politics. For several years now, I have been studying forms of art practice that emerged in Iraq at different political moments over the twentieth-century. I have come to focus on the aftermath of a coup by the Baʿath Party, in 1963, when the persecution of leftists prompted a number of writers and artists to turn away from the critical theory propagated by the Iraqi Communist Party, and to develop a new vocabulary in their practice. In a book I am writing about this moment, I explore what the artwork can offer at the limit of left-wing politics, and in particular how it can open a horizon beyond liberalism, by re-activating forms and concepts sourced from the history of religious traditions.

I received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015; and an AB in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2005. Before coming to UC Santa Barbara, I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow in the EUME research program at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. In 2016 I worked with the curator Catherine David to develop parts of my dissertation into a retrospective of the artist Dia al-Azzawi at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. The gallery guide from that show can be viewed here; the full catalog is available on Amazon.

Martijn Buijs is a scholar of 19th and 20th century European philosophy, with a particular focus on German Idealism and Phenomenology. In 2017 he completed his dissertation Freedom and Revelation: A Systematic Reconstruction of Schelling’s Late Philosophy in the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. His current research at UC Santa Barbara is on the concept of love in its ethical, political, and metaphysical dimensions in the work of contemporary philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben.

Simon Thornton received his BA in Politics and Eastern European Studies at University College, London, where he specialized in Russian and post-Soviet culture and politics. After spending two years working for an NGO in the Republic of Armenia his interests became decidedly more theoretical, and he returned to his hometown to complete an M.A. in political theory at the University of Sheffield. Simon then completed his Ph.D. research at the University of Essex, where he focused on the moral phenomenology of the Danish thinker K.E. Løgstrup. At the Humanities and Social Change Center, Simon is currently working on a project which brings together the insights concerning human powerlessness and finitude found in the work of Løgstrup, Kierkegaard and others with a view to understanding and addressing contemporary social change. So far, he has produced draft papers on Løgstrup’s theory of expressions of life and on Kierkegaard’s theories of tragedy and guilt. Currently, he is working on a paper comparing Løgstrup and Kierkegaard tentatively entitled ‘Receiving Life as a Gift: On Løgstrup’s Dispute with Kierkegaard.’