Bloch Centre People

Artemis Ignatidou is an interdisciplinary researcher borrowing methodologies from musicology, music & art history, philosophy, and performance practice to write European cultural history in the 19th and 20th centuries. She holds a PhD in History and is also a piano tutor (DipABRSM) and occasionally a performer. As a Visiting Fellow at the Bloch Centre, Artemis will be testing Martin Buber’s philosophy of art against his philosophical influences, his personal relationship to interdisciplinary artistic practice, and his political objectives. Do not hesitate to get in touch if you are interested in interdisciplinary collaborations at the methodological intersection of music, cultural history, and philosophy/intellectual theory. [October 2021-June 2022]  

Nathaniel J. P. Barron is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute’s Ernst Bloch Centre and an early-career researcher and adult education lecturer specialising in German philosophy. He received a PhD in 2017 from the University of Central Lancashire, in a funded project that explores the nature of language in Ernst Bloch's speculative materialism. He has been a visiting researcher at the Hegel-Archiv, Bochum, the Ernst Bloch Zentrum, Ludwigshafen, and the Walter Benjamin Archiv, Berlin. He is currently re-working his thesis for publication with Historical Materialism/Brill, entitled Language in Ernst Bloch's Speculative Materialism: A Reading of Anacoluthon (2020). The work situates the importance of Bloch's language-speculation in the Continental tradition via a sustained reading of anacoluthon, a rhetorical figure which denotes a break in the flow of syntax. He is also currently writing a book-chapter on Bloch and creativity for a series entitled Anticipation, Creativity, Ontology: Making the Present from the Future (Routledge, 2020). [September 2019-May 2020]

Federico Filauri studied philosophy at the University of Padua, graduating with a thesis on the relationship between aísthesis and alétheia in Martin Heidegger. His MA thesis, also written at the University of Padua, was on the Wir-Problem in the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. He is currently registered as a research student at the IMLR, where he is working on a historical-philosophical study of German-Jewish thought in the 20^th century, with the emphasis on theological-political aspects.

Artemis Ignatidou is an early-career cultural historian working on 19th-century European history, with a special interest in western art music, musical exchange in the continent, and the construction of reciprocal musical and national identities through the arts. She holds a PhD in modern European history (2018), an MA in Modern World History (2013), and a BA in Media & Communications (2011). She enjoys writing literature, plays the piano and starts learning to play a new instrument every month; she performs and is a proficient kazoo player. Her work on 19th- and 20th-century musical exchange is currently under publication. In 2016 and 2018 she was awarded fully-funded residencies at the prestigious Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity in Canada. At the Ernst Bloch Centre she will be working on music and ideology in the 19th century, gender representation in the opera, and contemporary musical practice. [September 2018-June 2019]

Cat Moir is Lecturer in Germanic Studies at the University of Sydney, where she also contributes to the European Studies programme. Her research is broadly concerned with the history of ideas in Europe from the late 18th to the late 20th century. A particular focus has been 20th-century critical theory and its intellectual roots in German idealism and romanticism, historical materialism, (neo-)Kantianism, and psychoanalysis. Her first book, Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics, forthcoming with Brill, provides a new interpretation of Bloch’s philosophy that situates it in the context of historical debates about the relationship between natural science and materialist philosophy. Moir's current project, 'Biological Thought and the European Left, 1800-1933', examines how progressive social and political thought in Europe was influenced by scientific biology from its emergence as a distinct discipline around 1800, to 1933 when the rise of the Nazi biological state fundamentally changed the European intellectual and political landscape. [January-March 2019]

Bodi Wang is a PhD student and Research Assistant at the TU Dortmund University. For her undergraduate degree, she studied philosophy at the Renmin University of China and completed her Masters degree at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. In 2016, she started her PhD research under the supervision of Professor Christian Neuhäuser focusing on the epistemic problem of social integration. The Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung has supported her research with a doctoral scholarship since 2017. Her research interests include philosophy of history, social philosophy (especially critical theory) and analytical philosophy with particular focus on ethics/politics of knowledge. She will conduct her research project under the supervision of Dr Johan Siebers at the Bloch Centre for German Thought. [September 2018-February 2019]

Jeremy Coleman is a Teaching Assistant in the Music Department, University of Aberdeen, and a Visiting Fellow at the Ernst Bloch Centre for German Thought (IMLR). He received his PhD in Musicology from King’s College London for research on Wagner, supervised by Michael Fend and John Deathridge (2016). Prior to that, he read Music at Clare College, Cambridge, and continued studies there at graduate level. His various research interests centre on social and material approaches to 19th-century music history, with particular focus on French and German composer-critics. He is pursuing two main projects: a study of musical production and criticism during the Vormärz and July Monarchy, and a more theoretical contribution to Marxist music historiography.  In general, he seeks to use critical theory and philosophy, especially Marxist thought, in order to shed new light on the more traditional concerns and materials of music history. His research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Royal Musical Association and Music & Letters, and he has presented on various topics to international conferences in UK, USA, Belgium, Italy and Poland. He is also in demand as a pianist and accompanist, specialising in song accompaniment and opera repetiteurship. [September 2017-June 2018]