Notes on Contributors
Agata Bielik-Robson is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and Professor of Philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Publishing in Polish, German, French and Russian as well as English, she has written extensively on issues in the philosophy of religion, psychoanalysis and Romanticism. Her books include The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (2011), Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influence (co-edited with Adam Lipszyc, 2014), Philosophical Marranos: Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity (2014) and Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (2019).
Ivan Boldyrev is Assistant Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is the author of Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries (2014), Hegel, Institutions and Economics (with Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, 2014) and Die Ohnmacht des Spekulativen. Elemente einer Poetik von Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (2021) as well as the editor of Interpreting Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (with Sebastian Stein, 2021). In addition to German Idealism and critical theory, he also works on the history and philosophy of economics.
Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of three monographs, including Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies (2003), which was awarded a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award and has been translated into three European languages as well as Chinese, and Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying (2024). Among his seven edited volumes on literary and cultural theory are Modern German Thought from Kant to Habermas (with Duncan Large, 2012) and Tzvetan Todorov: Thinker and Humanist (with Karine Zbinden, 2020).
Sam Dolbear is a Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Culture Inquiry. He completed his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2018 with a thesis entitled Names Written in Invisible Ink: Walter Benjamin, Friendship and Historical Generation. He subsequently became a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, exploring two figures of exile in London: the radio-producer and composer Ernst Schoen (1884–1960) and the sexologist and palmist Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), about whom he is currently preparing publications. He has taught and published widely on modern German thought and culture and is a founding member of the audio-radio collective MayDay Radio.
Vincent Geoghegan is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Reason and Eros: The Social Theory of Herbert Marcuse (1981), Utopianism and Marxism (1987), Ernst Bloch (1996) and Socialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth (2011). He has edited Political Ideologies: An Introduction (with Rick Wilford, 1984) and Political Thought in Ireland Since the Seventeenth Century (with D. George Boyce and Robert Eccleshall, 1993).
Holger Glinka is a member of the international research network Natural Law 1625–1850, led by the universities of Halle-Wittenberg and Erfurt, as well as a founding board member of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. From 2001 until 2014, he was based at the Hegel-Archiv in Bochum as an editor of the Hegel-Studien. He is the author of Zur Genese autonomer Moral: Eine Problemgeschichte des Verhältnisses von Naturrecht und Religion in der frühen Neuzeit und der Aufklärung (second edition, 2012) and Hegels Naturrechtsaufsatz: Ein interdisziplinärer kooperativer Kommentar (with Michael Städtler, 2021) as well as the co-editor of Denker und Polemik (with Kevin Liggieri and Christoph Manfred Müller, 2013). He is currently preparing an edition of Christian Wolff’s 1739–40 lectures on Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis.
Loren Goldman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous articles on Immanuel Kant, William James, John Dewey, Ernst Bloch, Richard Rorty and Wendy Brown, as well as the co-translator of Bloch’s Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left (with Peter Thompson, 2019), which he also introduced and annotated. His most recent publication is The Principle of Political Hope (2023).
Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA. His books on contemporary theory include Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity (1989), Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1990) and a trilogy of studies on postmodern theory with Steve Best. Works in cultural and media studies include Media Culture (1995), Media Spectacle (2003) and Media Spectacle and Insurrection (2012) as well as Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (with Michael Ryan, 1988) and Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush/Cheney Era (2009). Douglas Kellner is also the author of two books on Donald Trump’s authoritarian populism, American Nightmare (2016) and American Horror Show (2017). In addition, he has written a trilogy on the media and the Bush administration: Grand Theft 2000 (2001), From 9/11 to Terror War (2003) and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy (2005). The author of Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984), Kellner is also the series editor of the Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse (1998–2004).
Cat Moir is Senior Lecturer in Germanic Studies at the University of Sydney. She previously held lectureships at Cambridge and Durham in the UK. Her main research areas are critical theory and the history of ideas in the German-speaking world. Among her many publications are Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics (2019) and the co-edited volume Reform, Revolution and Crisis in Europe: Landmarks in History, Memory and Thought (with Bronwyn Winter, 2021).
Jan Rehmann is Visiting Professor for Critical Theories and Social Analysis at Union Theological Seminary in New York and Privatdozent at the Freie Universität Berlin. His books include Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism: Deleuze and Foucault (2022), Max Weber: Modernisation as Passive Revolution: A Gramscian Analysis (2015), Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection (2013), Pedagogy of the Poor (with Willie Baptist, 2011) and Die Kirchen im NS-Staat (1986). He is the co-editor of Muß ein Christ Sozialist sein? Nachdenken über Helmut Gollwitzer (with Brigitte Kahl, 1994) as well as Das Argument and the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus.
Nina Rismal is the lead of Urban Food Futures, an action-orientated research programme at TMG (Think Tank for Sustainability) in Berlin. She holds a PhD in Political Theory from Cambridge and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in Santa Barbara and a researcher at The New Institute in Hamburg. Her book The Ends of Utopian Thinking will be published in the Brill/Historical Materialism Book Series in 2023.
Peter Thompson is the author of The Crisis of the German Left: The PDS, Stalinism and the Global Economy (2005), Karl Marx (2013) and numerous papers on German politics and critical theory as well as a variety of articles for The Guardian, mostly on Marxism and the Frankfurt School. He is the co-editor of The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (with Slavoj Žižek, 2013) and the co-translator of Bloch’s Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left (with Loren Goldman, 2019). From 1990 to 2015, he lectured in German politics, history and philosophy at the University of Sheffield. In 2008, he founded the Ernst Bloch Centre, which is currently based at the Institute of Modern Languages Research of the University of London.