Conference

We hold an annual conference. From 2016 onwards our conference takes place during July in Oxford. In previous years conferences took place during September in London. Our call for papers is announced late autumn each year. You can review previous conference schedules and listen to or watch recordings of sessions (where available) below.

Have a conference related query? Email us!

2020: Imagination and the Imaginary

Conference postponed until 2021.

2019: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

Day One

The Second Sex and the Uses of Wit
Claudia Bouliane (University of Ottawa)

Towards a Phenomenological Account of Complicity
Charlotte Knowles (University of Groningen)

Beauvoir and Classical Antiquity
Meryl Altman (DePauw University)

Throwing Like a Girl: Rethinking Body and Sexual Difference in the Age of Postfeminism
Sonjeong Cho (Seoul National University)

What is a woman? The Second Sex in the context of 20th Century Debates on Humanism
Johanna Sjöstedt (University of Gothenburg)

Selections from Les Bouches Inutiles
Directed by Antonia Mappin-Kasirer (Oxford University)

Mythologized Others in the All-Male Lord of the Flies
Minji Huh (Ewha Womans University)

Keynote Address: From Abdication to Independence: Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Love as an Emancipatory Analysis
Manon Garcia (Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows)

Day Two

Rethinking Existentialism: From Radical Freedom to Sedimentation
Jonathan Webber (Cardiff University)

What Kind of Situation is the Body in de Beauvoir?
Alex Thinius (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

The Woman’s Body in The Second Sex as the Sartrean Third Ontologic Dimension of Corporeality
Marika Della Sciucca (University of Rome 3)

Escaping Generality and Stereotypes: A Refusal of Feminine Topoi in the First Volume of The Second Sex
Phelan Hourigan (University of Victoria)

Les Invitées / They Came to Stay: Female Characters in The Second Sex
Aude Leblond (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3)

Expectant Anxiety in The Second Sex
Kate Kirkpatrick (King’s College London)

Writing in Refuge, Refuge in Writing: Spaces of and Spaces for Arendtian Activism
Michael Deckard and Jordon Makant (Lenoir-Rhyne University)

Eros Between Feminism and Politics: Arendt and de Beauvoir on romantic love
Liesbeth Schoonheim (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

The Way To a Sane Love? Beauvoir’s “Loving Woman” and Love as a Structuring Social Passion
Claudia De Campos (Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po))

2018: Existentialism and Political Thought

Day One

The Existential Turn in Recent Global Political Thought
T Storm Heter (East Stroudsburg University of PA)

Using Sartre to Identify ‘Pseudo-Political Action’ in the Age of Social Media
Mary Edwards (Cardiff University)

Could the Early Sartre have been a Free Market Capitalist?
Matt Eshleman (University of North Carolina Wilmington)

“Human Being is Freedom” Why Sartre Couldn’t Be a Neoliberal Thinker
Marta Agata Chojnacka (Nicolaus Copernicus University)

A History without Shadows
Duane H. Davis (University of North Carolina at Asheville)

Christian Existentialism and Political Thought: Freedom and Transcendence
Dries Deweer (Tilburg University)

Sartre’s ‘guerre fantôme’: A Kafkaesque Subtext in the Postwar Writings
Jo Bogaerts (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Does the City of Ends Correspond to a Classless Society? A New Idea of Democracy in Sartre’s Hope Now
Maria Russo (San Raffaele University)

Keynote Address: Simone de Beauvoir and the ‘New Materialisms’: Questioning the Posthuman Turn
Sonia Kruks (Oberlin College)

Day Two

Merleau-Ponty, Existential Phenomenology, and Transgender Body Politics
Chris Jingchao Ma (Villanova University)

Why Ecofeminists Should (Also) Be Ecophenomenologists
Robert Booth (University of Liverpool)

Sartre on Human Arbitrariness
Peter Hulme (Birkbeck, University of London)

Rethinking Authenticity: Sartre and Taylor in Dialogue
Kyle Shuttleworth (Queens University Belfast)

Learning from Fanon’s Lived Philosophy
Rafe McGregor (Leeds Trinity University)

Simone de Beauvoir and The Politics of Biography
Kate Kirkpatrick (University of Hertfordshire)

The Imaginary Gaze: A Re-Reading of Sartre’s Challenge to White Supremacy
Betty Jean Stoneman (Emory University)

Frantz Fanon, Misrecognition and Social Justice
Louis Blond (University of Cape Town)

Situating Women’s Experiences of Pornography
Fiona Vera Gray (Durham University)

Authenticité, Égalité, Fraternité? Existentialism, Charlie, and the Politics of Crisis
Elizabeth Benjamin (Coventry University)

Camus’s Artistic Sensibility and the Grey Zone of Violent Resistance
Maša Mrovlje (University of Edinburgh)

2017: After Existentialism

Existentialism and Political Failure: Lessons for Today
Michael Sigrist (George Washington University)

Seriality and the Crisis of Democracy: Taking Sartre into Democratic Theory
Matthias Lievens (KU Leuven)

The Second Sex: From Idealism to Materialism and Back
Katja Čičigoj (Justus-Liebig-University Giessen)

The Body is a Situation: Beauvoir Outside the Sex-Gender Distinction
Emma Jane McNicol (Monash University)

Authenticity Beyond Existentialism: A Socio-Existential Approach
Kyle Shuttleworth (Queens University Belfast)

Inauthenticity and Violence: The Case of Antisemitism
Dror Yinon (Bar-Ilan University)

Sartre’s Theory of the Author-Reader Relationship
Marieke Mueller (University of Paris Nanterre)

Mindfulness After Existentialism: Through the Mind’s Eye
Ruth Kitchen (EHESS Paris)

Existentialism and the Case against the Unconscious Mind
Ian Scrannage (South Gloucestershire and Stroud College)

The Critique of Presence: Sartre’s Influence on Derrida
Gavin Rae (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)

Alain Badiou: A Student of Sartre
Chingshun Sheu (National Taiwan Normal University)

The Existential Subject and Freedom in Learning
Miranda Matthews (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Sartre’s Conception of Agency and Its Value for the Philosophy of History
Sina Talachian (Kings College London)

Keynote Address: Christina Howells

2016: Existentialism and the Body

The Dialectics of (In)visibility and the Lived Experience of Race
Danielle Petherbridge (Columbia and UCD)

The Ageing Body
Kathleen Lennon (Hull)

Violence and Generosity: Meeting the Other’s Body in Cahiers pour une Morale
Maria Russo (San Raffaele, Milan)

Women’s Bodies and Consent to Submission in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
Manon Garcia (Panthéon-Sorbonne and Tufts)

‘It’s All Part of Growing Up’: Beauvoirian Bodies and Intrusion
Fiona Vera Gray (Durham)

What You Think (About Sartre’s Approach to the Philosophy of Mind) is What You Get
Matthew Eshleman (UNC Wilmington)

Keynote Address: Living Bodies
Katherine Morris (Oxford)

2015: Existentialism, Race and Gender

25 Years of Gender Trouble: Judith Butler and the Sartrean Imaginary
Kathleen Lennon (Hull)

Okonkwo and Frantz: Suicide in the thought of Achebe and Fanon
Dinesh Napal (Warwick)

Wilful Inauthenticity in the Francophone Caribbean: Re-reading a Bad Faith Narrative
Michael Wiedorn (Georgia Tech)

Adult Male-to-Female Transsexualism: A Clinical Existential-Phenomenological Inquiry
Roberto Vitelli (Naples Federico II)

Jean-Paul Sartre and the Arab World: A Reconsideration
Yoav Di-Capua (Texas Austin)

Keynote address: Race and Gender from the Standpoint of Sartre’s Philosophical Anthropology
Professor Lewis Gordon (Connecticut)

2014: Sartre, Existentialism and Political Thought

Emotions, Self-Deception, And (Political) Value
Daniel Vanello (Warwick)

Sartre and Love: an extrapolation of a bilateral theory of emotional attachment
Oliver Downing (Liverpool)

On Translating Being and Nothingness
Sarah Richmond (UCL)

Keynote Address: Surviving the Neoliberal Maelstrom: A Sartrean Phenomenology of Social Hope
Ronald Aronson (Wayne State)

Existentialism is not a Humanism: Nothingness, perversion and the non-humanist conception of man in early Sartre
David Mitchell (Liverpool)

From a Phenomenological to a Materialist Body: Embodiment in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason
Cas McMenamin (Kingston)

Practical and Rational Freedom: the politics of private life
Sebastian Cupido (HvA)

2013: Sartre and Camus

Sartre: An Augustinian Atheist?
Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford)

Roquentin and the Autodidact, or the Critique of Humanism in La Nausée
Benedict O’Donohoe (Sussex)

Marxism and Subjectivity: the 1961 conference in Rome
Michel Kail (ITEM Paris) and Raoul Kirchmayr (Trieste)

Freedom and Fetishism in Sartre’s Search for a Method
Andrea Walsh (Michigan State)

Sartre and Camus: War, Absurdity, and Bad Faith
Greg Chatterton (Trinity St David)

The Metaethical Implications of Sartre’s Argument against Limitations as Excuses
Peter Hulme (Birkbeck)

Étranger à moi-même: Sartre, Camus, and Avant-Garde Alterity
Elizabeth Benjamin (Birmingham)

The Root of the Disagreement between Camus and Sartre
Jonathan Webber (Cardiff)

2012: Sartre and Beauvoir on Ethics

Ethics in Practice: the Dialectic of Authenticity and Consequentialism
Alfred Betschart (Independent)

Sartre and Negativist Ethics
Patrick Engel (Basel)

Catastrophe, Proximity, Adherence: Sartre on Cinema in Les Mots
Patrick French (KCL)

Sartre on Hegel’s Dialectic of Mastery and Servitude
Daniel Herbert (Sheffield)

A Legacy of Shame: Occupation, Ambiguity, and Abortion in Beauvoir and Sartre
Ruth Kitchen (Leeds)

Ethics Between Liberty and Alterity: Sartre’s Point of View
Annalisa Marinelli (SSiS Puglia)

Shame as Fellow Feeling
Christian Skirke (UvA)

The Opening Pages of Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics
Paul Wallace (Independent)

2011: 18th Annual Conference

Christian Responses to Sartre and the Origins of Existentialism
Jonathan Judaken (Memphis)

Absurdity of Life in Being and Nothingness
Iddo Landau (Haifa)

Keynote Address: Annie Cohen-Solal

What Is a Phenomenological Ontology?
Matthew Eshleman (UNC Wilmington)

Drives as Original Facticity
Daniel O’Shiel (KU Leuven)

Jean-Paul Sartre and Nishitani Keiji: Nothing Between Them?
Michael Peckitt (Hull)

Laugh Along With Sartre
Ian Birchall (Independent)

2010: 17th Annual Conference

Sartre in Dialogues

Sartre and Adler: Individual Psychology and Existential Psychoanalysis
Alfred Betschart (Independent)

Sartre and Levinas: On Subjectivity
Anu Selvaraj (National University of Singapore)

Sartre and Aron: Covert Dialogue from the Cahiers to the Critique
Iain Stewart (Manchester)

Keynote

Sartre and Women: The Place of Lena Zenina
Jean-Pierre Boulé (Nottingham Trent)

Sartre and the Arts

Sartre on Baudelaire: Literary Interpretation Distorted by Philosophy
Noel E Boulting (Noboss, Kent)

Grace Revealed and Erased: Sartre on Tintoretto’s modest plenitude
Tim Huntley (Sussex)

2009: 16th Annual Conference

Consciousness and the Body

Sartre, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on Embodiment, Touch and the ‘Double Sensation’.
Dermot Moran (University College Dublin)

Living and Knowing Pain : Sartre’s Engagement with Biran.
Michael G Peckitt (University of Hull)

Jean-Paul Sartre and Didier Anzieu : ‘Consensuality’
Naomi Segal (Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London)

New Readings of ‘Old’ Texts

The Childhood of a Leader Revisited (Salauds and Moustaches)
Gary Cox (Independent Scholar)

The Day After Existentialism is a Humanism, and The Last Chance
Craig Vasey (University of Mary Washington, Virginia)

France and Cuba, Castro and De Gaulle : Rethinking Sartrean Messianism
John Ireland (University of Illinois at Chicago)

AHRC-sponsored Workshop

The Concept of Man in Sartre : Existentialism May be a Feminism?
Nao Sawada (Rikkyô University, Tokyo)

How to Welcome an Intellectual Superstar : Sartre in the Japanese Press.
Masamichi Suzuki (Hosei University, Tokyo)

Brief remarks from Kevin Gray (Université Laval, Québec) and Rebecca Pitt (Essex), AHRC Postgraduate Bursary Awardee.

2008: 15th Annual Conference

Sartre and Beauvoir: One Philosophy? Sartre and Beauvoir on Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and the Question of the ‘Look’
Deborah Evans

“Le dévoilement de l’être” in Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
Marcella Arieli

Simone de Beauvoir’s Method in her Book Old Age and its Relation to Sartre’s Comments on Method in The Problem of Method
Paul Wallace (Independent)

Keynote Address: Genesis, Theory and Practice of Commitment in Sartre and Beauvoir
Professor Ingrid Galster (University of Paderborn)

Sartre’s “Alternative” conception of Phenomena in Being and Nothingness
Eric Tremault

Over-Intellectualizing our Aesthetic Experiences: Sartre on Imagination and Non-Representational Art
Andreas Elpidorou

Sartre and God: A Spiritual Journey?
John Gillespie (Ulster)

2007: 14th Annual Conference

‘Metaphors of Self, Sartre and Phenomenology’
Craig Vasey (University of Mary Washington, Fredricksburg)

‘Morality and Authenticity in Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics’
Gail E. Linsenbard (New York University)

‘Sartre’s Silence: Rereading What is Literature?’
Nikolaj Lubecker (University of Aberdeen)

‘Human Freedom: its Possibles and its Possibility in the Theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel’
Helen Tattam (University of Nottingham)

‘Rethinking German Identity after the Nazi Experience: French Memories of Germans in Les Chemins de la liberté’
Manu Braganca (Queen’s University Belfast)

‘Les Séquestrés d’Altona: Reconsidering History and Commitment’
James Brydon (Magdalen College, Oxford)

‘Blanchot and Sartre’
Hannes Opelz (St John’s College, Cambridge)

2006: 13th Annual Conference

Was Existentialism Truly a Humanism?
Rudi Visker (Leuven)

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility
Roy Elveton (Carleton College, Minnesota)

Searle, Dennett and Sartre: A Visit in the Phenomenological Garden
Maria Antonietta Perna (Richmond American International University, London)

The Spirit of Seriousness and the Body and Soul Problem
Guillaume Seydoux (Metz)

‘La Femme Révoltée’ : Women and Violence in Sartre’s Les Mains Sales and Camus’s Les Justes.
María Luján Tubio (Pennsylvania State University)

Bad Faith and The Second Sex
Debra Bergoffen (George Mason, Virginia)

Sartre’s Existentialism in French Cinema
Viktor Piniaev (Kursk State, Russia)

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Impact on the Writings and Movies of Ôshima Nagisa
Dr Simone Müller (Zürich)

Special 2-Day Conference to Commemorate the Centenary of Jean-Paul Sartre’s birth

18-19 March 2005

Sartre’s Legacy in an Era of Obscurantism
Willie Thompson (formerly of Caledonian University)

Existentialism and Humanism 60 Years on
Debbie Evans (Sussex)

Sartre and Nietzsche: Brothers in Arms
Christine Daigle (Brock University, Ontario)

Towards a Phenomenological Ethics
Gérard Wormser (ENS Lettres et Sciences humaines, Lyon)

Keynote address: Sartre, Camus and Malraux
Olivier Todd

Fraternity, Terror and Hope
Ruud Welten (Rotterdam)

Sartre and Terror
Ian Birchall (Independent)

Sartrean Phenomenology, Intentionality and History
Roy Elveton (Carleton College, Minnesota)

The New Sartre: A Postmodern Progenitor?
Nik Farrell-Fox (Independent)

Sartre and the United States
Annie Cohen-Solal

Literature and Philosophy in Sartre’s Early Writings
Alain Flajoliet

A Surreptitious Romantic? Reading Jean-Paul Sartre through Victor Hugo
Bradley Stephens (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)

Hidden Word-Play in the Work of Jean-Paul Sartre
Peter Royle (Trent University, Ontario)

This page was last updated on 13 January 2017