Visiting Scholars & Students

Current Visiting Students

Daniela Tolchinsky

 

Daniela Tolchinsky is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is spending the 2021-2022 school year as 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.

Dexter Martin

 

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. 

Current Visiting Scholars

Gianluca Bonaiuti 

Professor Gianluca Bonaiuti

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

Nathalie Grandjean

Nathalie Grandjean holds a PhD in Philosophy (UNamur, 2018) and joined the CESIR, University Saint-Louis, Brussels (https://cesir.usaintlouis.be/) 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.

Past Visiting Students

Silvestre Gristina

 

Silvestre Gristina (Palermo, 24/02/1994) is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the University of Padua. He is spending the 2021-2022 school year as a Visiting Ph.D. student in the History of Consciousness Program at UCSC.
His research project aims to investigate the reception of Fichte’s transcendental philosophy in the Left Hegelians and young Marx's thought, paying special attention to the influence of Fichtean categories both on the development of Hess and Cieszkowski's philosophy of action, as well as on Marx’s philosophy of praxis. He graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy at the University of Bologna in 2016. In the academic year 2017-18, he spent two semesters at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, within the EU’s Erasmus program. He then graduated with a Master's degree in Philosophical Sciences at the University of Bologna in 2019.
During his Ph.D., he spent a semester (Feb - Jul 2021) at the  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. His research interests extend to classical German philosophy, young Hegelians thought Marx's philosophy and the twentieth-century development of Marxist philosophy.