Rachel Jones

Associate Professor

19th & 20th century continental philosophy, social and political philosophy including feminist philosophy, philosophy and literature, philosophy of art and aesthetics

Professor Jones received her B.A. in Philosophy and German from St. John's College, Oxford University, and her MA and PhD in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick. Her teaching and research interests include key thinkers and themes in continental and feminist philosophy (such as Kant, Nietzsche, Lyotard, and Irigaray; self and body, the sublime, sexual difference). She is interested in working with art and literature to explore philosophical questions and in the intersection of feminist philosophy with perspectives from queer theory, transnational feminisms, critical philosophies of race, and decoloniality. Her current research takes Kant's essays on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 as a prompt for re-interrogating human beings' relations to materiality, natality, and difference.

Dr. Jones is a member of the Executive Committees for the Luce Irigaray Circle and for philoSOPHIA. In Fall 2024, she was a Residential Faculty Fellow at the Center for Humanities Research at George Mason University. In summer 2025 she was a faculty seminar leader at the 47th annual meeting of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum.

Selected Publications

‘Irigaray and Feminism in French Philosophy After Beauvoir,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy, ed. Daniel Whistler and Mark Sinclair (Oxford University Press: 2024).

'Inclining Towards New Forms-of-Life: Cavarero, Agamben, and Hartman,’ in Political Bodies: Writings on Adriana Cavarero’s Political Thought, ed. Paula Landerreche Cardillo and Rachel Silverbloom (SUNY Press: 2024).

'Sexuate Difference in the Black Atlantic: Reading Irigaray with Hartman,' in What is Sexual Difference? Thinking with Irigaray, eds. Mary C. Rawlinson and James Sares (Columbia University Press, 2023), pp.253-277.

‘Thinking Otherwise with Irigaray and Maximin,’ in Thinking: A Philosophical History, eds D. Whistler and Y. Vassilopoulou (Routledge, 2021), pp.236-250.

'Dissonance, Resistance, and Perspectival Pedagogies,' in Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom, eds Ada S. Jaarsma and Kit Dobson (University of Alberta Press, 2020), pp.117-134.

'Kant, Hegel and Irigaray: From Chemism to the Elemental,' in Kant and the Continental Tradition: Sensibility, Nature and Religion (in memoriam: Gary Banham), Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, eds Sorin Baiasu and Alberto Vanzo (Routledge, 2020), pp. 146-170.

'Philosophical Métissage and the Decolonization of Difference: Luce Irigaray, Daniel Maximin, and the Elemental Sublime,' Special Issue of Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 5:2, 2018; 139-156.

'The Anthropocene and Elemental Multiplicity,' co-authored with Emily Parker, English Language Notes, Special Issue: Environmental Trajectories, Vol. 55. 1/2, Fall 2017; 61-69.

‘Active Matter and Vital Materiality: Between Irigaray and Bennett’, Special Issue of Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology on 'Irigaray and Ecofeminism', Vol. 46.2, 2015; 156-172.

‘On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again, and Letting Be’, in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, E. Fischer and R. Fortnum, eds. (London: Black Dog Publishing, September 2013).

‘Adventures in the Abyss: Kant, Irigaray and Earthquakes’, Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy, Volume 17.1, Spring 2013.

'Irigaray and Lyotard: Birth, Infancy, and Metaphysics’, Hypatia, Vol. 27 Issue 1, Winter 2012.

Luce Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy, Key Contemporary Thinkers series (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

Courses Taught

PHIL 156 What is Art?

PHIL 329 Philosophy After Auschwitz

PHIL 336 Twentieth-Century Continental Thought - Existentialism

PHIL 338 Philosophy, Race and Gender

PHIL339 Recent Continental Philosophy

PHIL 421 Philosophy Seminar (Nietzsche; Nietzsche and Foucault)

PHIL 721 Philosophy Graduate Seminar: Kant's third Critique; Lyotard and Nancy; Birth, Death, and the Human; Plurality, Singularity, Community: Arendt, Cavarero, Nancy.

PHIL 730 Nietzsche and his Readers

WMST 630/PHIL 694 Feminist Theory Across the Disciplines

HNRS 110 Research Methods

HNRS 130 Conceptions of Self

HNRS 240 Reading the Past: Body Politics – Women and the Political

Recent Presentations

"The Inconstancy of the Earth: Sexuate Difference, Contingency and Desire," 14th Meeting of the Irigaray Circle, hosted by the University of Iceland, 2024.

"Insurgent Care: Reading Adriana Cavarero with Saidiya Hartman," Women and Gender Studies' Annual Scholar's Lecture, George Mason University, 2022.

"'According to the Condition of the Mother': Race and Sexual Difference in Irigaray and Hartman," Australian Society for Continental Philosophy Annual Conference, hosted by Bond University, 2021.

"Wayward Methods for Unsettling Archives: Sexual Difference, Race, and the History of Modern Western Philosophy," Women in the History of Philosophy, annual conference of the Society for Women in Philosophy UK, hosted by Stirling University, 2021.

"Art for Earthlings: Philosophy and Art in an Age of Environmental Crisis," Philosophy Saturdays: a Public Philosophy series hosted by the Philosophy Department at Salisbury University, MA, with support from the Whiting Foundation; SU Galleries Downtown, 2018.

"'Lose your mother, always'? Re-interrogating the horizons of sexuate difference with Spillers, Hartman, and Sharpe," invited plenary, Horizons of Sexuate Difference: Scholarship on or Inspired by the Work of Luce Irigaray, 9^th Conference of The Luce Irigaray Circle, hosted by Brock University, Canada, 2018.

“Living with Contingency - A Response to Sue Wrbican’s ‘Well Past the Echo” Invited public talk, Greater Reston Arts Center, October 2017, to accompany an exhibition of new work by artist and George Mason Professor and Director of Photography, Sue Wrbican:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=y4vKleFOFcw&feature=youtu.be