Rachel Jones

Portrait of Rachel Jones
Titles and Organizations

Chair
Associate Professor

Contact Information

Email: rjones23@gmu.edu
Phone: 703.993.4328
Mail Stop: Honors College, MSN 1F4
Campus: Fairfax
Office: Horizon Hall 6269

Biography

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 decolonial theory. 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 .She currently serves as a 'Member at Large' for the International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP).

Selected Publications

‘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.

‘Re-Reading Diotima: Resources for a Relational Pedagogy’, Special Issue of Journal of Philosophy of Education: ‘Re-imagining Relationships in Education: Ethics, Politics and Practices’, ed. M. Griffiths et al, Vol 48 Issue 2, 2014; 183-201.

‘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).

‘Lyotard and Irigaray on Eros, Infancy and Birth: the Dissymmetrical Horizons of Being Between’, in Jean-François Lyotard: New Encounters, H. Bickis and R. Shields, eds. (Farnham: Ashgate, 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

PHIL 421 - Philosophy Seminar (Nietzsche)

PHIL 721 - Graduate Seminar: Kant's third Critique; Lyotard and Nancy; Birth, Death, and the Human.

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