Visiting Scholars & Students

Pietro Autorino is a researcher and practitioner of agroecology, whose work intersects STS and environmental humanities, with a focus on compost experimentalism and agroecological reparation. He is a doctoral student at the Centre for Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) in the Faculty of Social and Political Science at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Firenze. For his PhD he conducted four years of field research with soil practitioners through farm-based participatory action research, combined with a militant ethnography of political agroecology in Italy. His dissertation focuses on the ontological politics of compost regenerative practice, weaving the frictions between soil science and materialities with emergent imaginaries of contemporary agroecology.

Some keywords in Pietro’s research: soil; compost; agroecology; technoscience; ecological reparation; experimental practice; friction; science fiction; transdisciplinarity; 

Before joining COSMOS for his PhD at Scuola Normale Superiore, he earned an M.A. in Transcultural Studies from the University of Heidelberg and a B.A. in Development Studies & History from SOAS (University of London). He co-edits the blog and independent journal Epidemia. Between January and March 2026, Pietro is visiting the History of Consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz.

Sara Hassani is a Visiting Scholar and Assistant Professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at Providence College. She is a political theorist, whose research draws on qualitative methods, history, anthropology, feminist and critical theory, affect theory, and critical suicide studies to examine questions of power, embodiment, gender and self-destructive violence, and protest with a regional focus on Central and Western Asia.

Hassani received her PhD in Politics from the New School for Social Research, where she was a Prize, University in Exile, and ACLS-Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellow. Her first book manuscript, The Morality Police: Power, Embodiment and Protest in Post-Revolutionary Iran, builds on her 2023 APSA award-winning dissertation and investigates the high rates of self-immolation among young women and girls in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Through rigorous historical research and interviews with survivors of self-immolation, as well as with their doctors, caregivers, advocates, families, friends and neighbors, it offers a carefully contextualized reconstruction of the experiences of women who are typically dismissed as irrational in the official discourse and largely neglected by Western Scholars. The Morality Police unsettles prevailing notions of this institution and theorizes its expansive reach, illuminating the multidimensional operations of police power enacted on women’s bodies in their daily and intimate lives and the unconventional political agency they exercise under and against that police power. 

Her recent article, “Affective Resistance Against Sovereign Erasure: Historicizing the (Maternal) and Feminist Politics of Shared Grief in Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising,” is forthcoming in Theory & Event. She has previously published in peer-reviewed journals including Central Asian Survey and The International Feminist Journal of Politics, and has contributed to numerous print and online media outlets, including Outlook India, Town Hall, The Huffington Post, Foreign Policy Association, and The New York Times, among others.

Yıldırım Ortaoğlan received his PhD in Philosophy from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey (2023), with a dissertation entitled Power and Being in Foucault and Heidegger. His research interests include ontology, modern philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of technology, fascism, and metapolitical ontology.
He has authored several peer-reviewed journal articles, including works on the interplay of space, being, and power in Heidegger and Foucault, and the concept of “the others of power” in Foucault. His publications also explore topics such as Nietzsche’s relation to Islam, the “death of God,” and the intersection of homeland, anxiety, and technology. In addition to his articles, he has contributed book chapters on the concept of will in Hegel and on Farabi’s thought in relation to politics and morality.

Ortaoğlan has presented his research at international conferences, addressing themes such as human rights and the future, and Hegel’s “end of art” thesis. He was a recipient of the Turkish Council of Higher Education’s prestigious 100/2000 PhD Scholarship (2018–2022).

His work seeks to focus on metapolitical ontology, fascism, racism, and contemporary political debates.

Shai Gortler is a Visiting Scholar whose focus is political theory. His research and teaching span incarceration, surveillance, settler colonialism, and subject formation. In particular, his research looks at sites of extremely unbalanced power relations such as prisons, surveillance, and settler colonialism, to analyze how political subjects are made and unmade in these contexts.

Shai received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. He was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, an Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. His work has appeared in top-tier journals like Contemporary Political Theory, Constellations, Theory & Event, New Political Science, and Philosophy & Society. His first book manuscript, Carceral Subjectivity and the Exercise of Freedom, explores the Israeli incarceration and torture of Palestinian political prisoners since Israel’s founding in 1948 until 2023 as a multi-layered site of subject formation. His website is https://www.shaigortler.com

Silvestre Gristina is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Global Fellow between the University of Padua and the University of California, Santa Cruz. As part of his MSCA project, he will be spending a two-year research period at the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC. 

Silvestre received his PhD in Philosophy in June 2023 from the University of Padua. He carried out a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples, then completed a twenty-month postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Humanities of the University of Ferrara. His research interests include the history of German Classical Philosophy, the philosophies of the Young Hegelians and Marx, the history of twentieth-century Marxism, and the development of twentieth-century French philosophy. He is currently engaged with methodological questions concerning the history of philosophy and the history of political thought. His research project, “Temporalities, Histories, and Methods of Philosophy”, intends to contribute to the studies on the critique of the Western Canon, through specific reflection on the History of Philosophy and its political nature.

Gianluca Bonaiuti is Professor of Storia delle dottrine politiche (History of Political Ideas) in Department of Political and Social Sciences at University of Florence (Università degli Studi di Firenze). His education took place between Florence, Pisa, Paris, London, Bielefeld. His research concerns Political Theory, Theory of History (Tempo a senso unico, Milan, Mimesis, 1999; La catastrofe e il parassita, Milan, Mimesis, 2004, with Alessandro Simoncini), Political Concept of People (Corpo sovrano, Rome, Meltemi, 2006; Il governo del popolo III. Dalla Comune di Parigi alla prima guerra modiale, Rome, Viella, 2014, with Gianni Ruocco and Luca Scuccimarra), Political Violence (Senza asilo, Verona, Ombrecorte, 2011), Utopia (Una teoria politica della finzione, Verona, Ombrecorte, under publication). He is the editor of the italian translation of books by Niklas Luhmann, Boris Groys, Peter Sloterdijk. His last book, published in 2019, is Lo spettro sfinito. Note sul parassitismo metodico in Peter Sloterdijk (Milano, Mimesis).

Nathalie Grandjean holds a PhD in Philosophy (UNamur, 2018) and joined the CESIR, University Saint-Louis, Brussels in October 2021 for 3 years as FNRS research fellow, under the supervision of Prof. Benedikte Zitouni. The climatic bodies project explores the political bodies of the Anthropocene, attempting to rethink embodiment, subjectivation, and temporalities from feminist and ecofeminist writings. She authored as a co-editor “Corps et Technologies. Penser l’hybridité” (with Claire Lobet, Peter Lang, 2012) and “Valeurs de l’attention” (with Alain Loute, Presses du Septentrion, 2019) and as main author “Généalogies des corps de Donna Haraway. Féminismes, diffractions, figurations” (Presses de l’ULB, 2021) and “Le visage capturé. De la reconnaissance faciale au distanciel” (Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2022). In 2019-2020, she was a visiting lecturer at UCLouvain (Belgium), as well as a visiting lecturer and researcher at the University of Technology of Compiègne (Sorbonne Universities, France).  She is also member of the Board of Sophia, the Belgian gender studies network, and a member of the management committee of the Advanced Master in Gender Studies.

Prashan Ranasinghe is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa and between January and May 2024, Visiting Scholar in the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz. He was trained in criminology and the sociology of law. His first book, Helter-Shelter: Security, Legality and an Ethic of Care (University of Toronto Press, 2017), which received an honourable mention at the Canadian Law and Society Association book prize, 2018, is in line with this type of thinking and interests. More recently his work has moved into philosophy and the humanities more broadly which has given rise to his forthcoming book, The Homelessness of Being: Heidegger and the Meaning of Existence (University of Alberta Press, December 2024). Based upon this line of inquiry, he is currently working on a project on the relation between philosophy and theology with a specific focus upon Heideggerian and Nietzschean thinking as it has shaped 20th and 21st century Western philosophy.

Safae el Khannoussi is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation traces the inception and reform of the modern prison system in the Maghreb region (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco), alongside anti-carceral resistance practices and epistemologies. Engaging critically with the concept of subaltern captivity—the systemic carceral condition imposed on marginalized and dispossessed peoples—she explores the production of necropower and its entanglement with postcolonial nation-state building. Her work foregrounds practices of defiance by incarcerated people and post-carceral imaginaries that challenge dominant political paradigms. Her work speaks to contemporary debates on mass incarceration, the longe durée of colonial violence, and the role of abolition within decolonial thought. 

Her doctoral research is part of Abolition Democracies: Transnational Perspectives (ASCA), a project investigating the role of abolitionist movements in reshaping democratic theory and confronting systemic violence. Safae holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy and a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Amsterdam. From February to May 2025, she will be a visiting scholar in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Stefan Rohrhirsch is a research associate and doctoral student at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology. In his dissertation, he develops a critical analysis of societal relations to nature and their politics in the Anthropocene. The project focuses on an environmental form of biopower which governs human and more-than-human populations by intervening in and modifying their material surroundings. The objective of the thesis is to critically analyze this rationale of environmental government and its implications for political theory, and to explore ways of relating to nature without reproducing biopolitical power relations by connecting to and going beyond Foucauldian approaches, Historical and New Materialisms, and decolonial cosmopolitics. Stefan holds B.A. degrees in political science and philosophy from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. While completing his M.A. in Political Theory at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and Technische Universität Darmstadt, he was also a visiting student at the New School for Social Research in New York. Between January and June 2025, he is visiting the History of Consciousness Department at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Daniela Tolchinsky is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is currently a UCEAP Reciprocity student in the History of Consciousness Program at UCSC. Daniela’s research interests include group agency, collective subjectivity, historical justice, and conceptions of sovereignty. Her PhD project explores the connection between collective subjectivity and emancipatory politics. She is interested in the cultivation of collective subjectivity as a mode for generating group-agents, and how the conceptual centering of universals or individuals, by contrast, limits the possibility of collective agency. Daniela is originally from New York. She graduated from University of Chicago with a BA in Political Science and International Studies after completing an Honors thesis on the limits of the Argentine transitional justice process. Prior to beginning her graduate studies, Daniela worked as a community organizer engaged in anti-occupation work in Israel and Palestine.

Filip Brzeźniak is a PhD student in Philosophy at the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. His dissertation is concerned with the historical and speculative relations between melancholy, materialism, and radical emancipatory politics. His other research interests include rhetorical criticism of philosophy and political discourse, psychoanalysis of fantasies and social imaginaries, research on the relations between the far right and ecology/environment, the critique of political/economic theology, and the Frankfurt School. He is currently working on an issue of Praktyka Teoretyczna/Theoretical Practice journal, concerned with the Actuality of the Frankfurt School (in Polish).

Simon Reiners is a doctoral student at the Department of Social Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Simon’s research focuses on the concept of materiality and on nature-culture relations in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and New-Materialist Feminist epistemology and critique. In his project, he analyses the entanglement of body and knowledge in the works of respective authors Nietzsche, Adorno, Haraway and Barad. These writers read the body as the side of inscribing relations of domination and, at the same time, the side of recognizing them to open up agency of resisting and re-shaping. Simon studied Philosophy and Social Science in Glasgow, Virginia and Frankfurt, where he also gained his M.A. degree in Philosophy and Social Science. He further teaches ethics and social theory at the Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology in Frankfurt.

María de la Cruz Vilas is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Santiago de Compostela where she is teaching in the ungraduate course Ecology and Philosophy, Contemporary History of Philosophy: Ninteenth Century and History and Philosophy of Religions. Maria’s dissertation is titled “Interweaving of Fiction and Reality. The Materiality of Discourse in Donna Haraway”. The main point is to investigate through Donna J. Haraway’s work how a more-than-human ontology can imply new ways of understanding discourse and knowledge and thus other forms of discourses in which the boundaries separating fiction and reality are no longer so clear. By focusing on the work of Donna Haraway, the fundamental objective of her dissertation can be described as an analysis of the tension between fiction, materiality and discourse, as well as the modes in which the articulation of this tension multiplies the world or makes “worlding” possible. Onto-epistemology, discourse and politics are thus understood from this point of view as inseparable.

Dexter Martin is a PhD student in the Institute for Research in Humanities and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, Mexico. He is spending the 2022-2023 school year as a Visiting Graduate Scholar in the History of Consciousness Program at UCSC. Dexter’s research interests include political subjectivity, aesthetics in politics, representation in cultural studies, subjectivity processes in social movements, and media studies. His PhD project explores a critique of certain traditional notions of the concept of subjectivity. He proposes a conceptual stance that opens the way to processes that offer a different point of view from identity politics, that is, a political use of a transformed self. He is currently trying to mobilize these concepts through different social phenomena: budism, modern revolts characterized by lack of leadership, Zapatismo, the use of masks as a political mean, queer theory, internet anonymity and invisibility, etc. Dexter was born in San Diego, but moved to Mexico when he was a teenager. He graduated from the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos with a BA in Philosophy after completing a thesis on Hannah Arendt’s concept of banality applied to modern societies.