About

Sartre?

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, journalist, and political activist. His broad and sophisticated philosophical vision contributes to contemporary moral and political theory, aesthetic and literary theory, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, phenomenology and cognitive science, theology and philosophy of religion, and more. His novels are still read and his plays still produced.

The Society

The UK Sartre Society is dedicated to the study and application of French existentialism and phenomenology, focusing primarily on the works of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). We hold a major international conference every summer and edit one of the two issues of the journal Sartre Studies International each year. Membership is open to everyone.

The Committee and Advisory Board

Executive Committee

President: Jonathan Webber is Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University. He is the author of Rethinking Existentialism (OUP, 2018) and The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (Routledge, 2009), editor of Reading Sartre: on Phenomenology and Existentialism (Routledge, 2010), and translator of Sartre’s book The Imaginary (Routledge, 2004). He has published papers on Sartre in European Journal of Philosophy, Sartre Studies International, and various edited volumes.

Treasurer: Kate Kirkpatrick is Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Becoming Beauvoir (Bloomsbury, 2019), Sartre on Sin (OUP, 2017), and Sartre and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2017), and co-author of The Mystical Sources of Existentialist Thought (Routledge, 2018). She has published articles on Sartre in The European Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Sartre Studies International. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Director: Marieke Mueller is Lecturer in French at Aberystwyth University. She has published papers on Sartre’s theory of freedom and his theory of political violence. She has coedited a special issue of Sartre Studies International on the relevance of Sartre’s thought today and is currently working on a book on Sartre’s biography of Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille.

Equalities Officer: Mary Edwards is Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. She has published papers on phenomenology and feminist philosophy in Hypatia, Discipline Filosofiche, and Sartre Studies International, and is currently writing a book on the development of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis across his career.

Webmaster: Beck Pitt is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University (UK). She completed her PhD (Jean-Paul Sartre and the Question of Emancipation) at University of Essex in 2012 and has published papers on Sartre’s theory of political emancipation.

Advisory Board

Manu Braganca is a Lecturer in French Studies at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the history and memories of WWII in France. He is the author of Hitler’s French Literary Afterlives (Palgrave, 2019), Writing Vichy: Ego-Histories of France and the Second World War (Palgrave, 2018), and The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War (Berghahn, 2018, 2nd edn). He is particularly interested in the early Sartre, his novels, plays, and essays on imagination and emotions.

Nik Farrell Fox is a Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Lincoln and UK Reviews Editor for Sartre Studies International. He is the author of The New Sartre (Continuum, 2003) and several articles on the relation between Sartre’s philosophy and French Poststructuralism. He is currently writing a book on Sartre and Nietzsche.

John Gillespie is Professor (Emeritus) of French Language and Literature at University of Ulster. He has published papers on the religious dimensions of Sartre’s philosophy. He has published papers on the interactions between literature, philosophy, and theology in the writings of Beckett, Camus, Gide, and Sartre. His work in applied linguistics includes a co-authored book on the importance of evaluative concepts in translation. He is currently one of the UK editors of Sartre Studies International and is a former President of the UK Sartre Society.

Katherine Morris is Supernumerary Fellow in Philosophy at Mansfield College Oxford. She is the author of Sartre (Blackwell, 2008) and Starting with Merleau-Ponty (Continuum 2012), co-author of Descartes’s Dualism (Routledge, 1995), editor of Sartre on the Body (Palgrave, 2010), and co-editor of the OUP series International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry. She has published numerous papers on Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of psychiatry in leading academic journals and edited volumes. She is currently one of the UK editors of Sartre Studies International.

Paul Wallace 

Paul Wallace was an independent scholar who had studied Sartre’s philosophical and biographical works, and their reception in the English speaking world, for more than thirty years. Paul was one of our longest serving and most loyal members. He combined his impressive knowledge and infectious enthusiasm about all aspects of the works of Sartre and Beauvoir with a friendliness and generosity of spirit that made him a great participant at our conferences.

He initially studied Fine Art, received a B.Ed.(Hons) in Film Studies from Reading University, and an M.A. in Media Studies from the Institute of Education, London University.  Before his passing in 2016 he was investigating the dialectical structures of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s later works.

Paul’s contributions to the field, through his own conference presentations, his responses to other people’s talks, and his work on the committee have been highly valuable. We shall certainly miss him. The 2016 UK Sartre Society conference was dedicated to Paul’s memory.

Picture credits: all used with permission and Beck Pitt: “Open Textbook Summit 2015” by BCcampus_News licensed under CC-BY SA 2.0

This page was last updated on 31 January 2017