Past-Present-Future Speakers

Alberto Parisi is Specially Appointed Assistant Professor at the Kobe Institute for Atmospheric Studies (KOIAS) of Kobe University, Japan. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University (2023) and a BA in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick (2017). His research lies at the intersection of Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and Environmental Humanities, with a focus on breath, voice, air, and atmosphere as concepts that bridge materiality and meaning across traditions. His forthcoming book The Intention of the Spirit: From Intention to Atmosphere (Routledge, 2026) offers the first genealogy of intention as a material and respiratory concept, tracing its transformation from ancient Stoic pneumatology to modern European poetics and contemporary philosophy.

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Phil Gaydon completed his undergrad, MA and PhD at Warwick between 2007 and 2018. His thesis focused on children’s literature and a virtue epistemology approach to education.While at Warwick he also created and taught modules on the philosophy of sport, the imagination and the ethical development of children for the IATL, won the WATE-PGR award twice, worked in primary and secondary schools around the country as a Philosophy Specialist for The Philosophy Foundation, and coached women’s American football at university and international level. He currently teaches PSHE, Religious Studies and Philosophy at St Paul’s School in London, and is the school’s Head of Character Education.

Sydney Harvey is currently completing her Ph.D in philosophy in the areas of artificial intelligence, mind, and aesthetics under the supervision of Jesse Prinz and Noel Carroll at the City University of New York, the Graduate Center. She is also currently a pre-doctoral research fellow with the Fay Horton Sawyer Center for Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Before her time at the GC, she received a US/UK American Fulbright Award to complete her Master's degree in Philosophy and the Arts at Warwick University in England. In 2024, she was a Philosophy in the Media Fellow with the Mellon Foundation, partnered with the New Yorker for long-form journalism. Sydney has been published in Hyperallergic with a piece called "Visiting MoMA While Black,” as well as two academic papers in the Film and Philosophy Journal titled “A Reflection of the Sun”, “Electric Light”. Her research interests consider the correlations between environment, embodied emotion, perception, and ethical engagement in both human and machine minds.

Ole Martin Skilleås, born 1962 in Namsos, studied at the University of Trondheim (Cand.Phil. 1988) and got his PhD at Warwick in 1992. Since 1994 he has worked in the departments of English and Philosophy at The University of Bergen, Norway, and was made Professor of Philosophy from 2001. He has written Philosophy and Literature (Edinburgh UP 2001), The Aesthetics of Wine (w. Douglas Burnhan, another Warwick alumn) (Wiley-Blackwell 2012) and Aesthetic Expertise (Lexington Books 2024). He has been an active politician, but now spends his spare time on tennis and wine – but at separate points in time.

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Kae Rose is a tutor at the Royal College of Art and a CHASE-AHRC funded doctoral researcher at Birkbeck, University of London. She is currently researching solarpunk, a planetary genre of utopian eco-fiction entwined with inclusive eco-activist praxis. She teaches writing to art students, a practice that daily reminds her of transformative lessons gained during her MA in Philosophy and Literature (Warwick, 2011). After her MA, she worked in language teaching in South Korea, Chile and Australia before returning home to east London. She is also a labour union organiser with RCA UCU, and an urban permaculture practitioner.

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Joseph Shafer teaches at the University of Marburg in the Department of English and American Studies and specializes in critical theory, aesthetics, modern and contemporary poetry, 20th-century American literature, and transatlanticism. He has published various essays on the aesthetics of Lacan, Badiou, Derrida, Rancière, Fred Moten, and painters such as Stanley Whitney, as well as on poets ranging from Mallarmé, H.D., Stephen Jonas, Norma Cole, Claudia Rankine, Rosmarie Waldrop, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, Charles Olson, Susan Howe, and Ben Lerner. He is the editor of Mediations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest, coeditor of a new Selected Poems of Barbara Guest, and author of the forthcoming Appearing beside Text: Uprisings of In-difference in Post-1945 American Poetry.

Maria Zanella is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. She was taught analytic philosophy at the Istituto di Studi Filosofici in Lugano, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on feeling qualities, poetry, and music under the supervision of Kevin Mulligan. She received a scholarship from the Department of Philosophy at Warwick to pursue an MA in Philosophy and the Arts, where she completed the degree with a thesis on implied propositions in literature and won the 2020 Philosophy Examiners’ Prize. One year later she secured funding from the AHRC and started her PhD research on the metaphysics of sadness, the paradox of fiction, and musical expressivity. In 2023, the Alpine Fellowship awarded her one of their Academic Prizes and invited her to speak at their symposium, where she gave a talk Link opens in a new windowon sadness, loss, and flourishing. Her paper 'Sadness is not about Loss' was published in Organon F earlier this year.

Martin Warner: I studied PPE at Oxford, and also the Dip Ed, and then for my BPhil under Gilbert Ryle, Alasdair MacIntyre, G E L Owen and others. After a few years as a member of the Philosophy Department at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, I was invited to apply to the University of Warwick for the new philosophy lectureship associated with the envisaged integrated undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Literature. I joined the Department in 1969 and stayed until I retired in 2005. In 1985 we set up the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature (later developing into the CRPLA) in association with a bespoke Phil/Lit MA (and subsequently PhD), a book series (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature), and a series of international conferences, I being its first Programme Director. I was the Department’s Director of Graduate Studies from 1992-1996, and Chair of its Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health Steering Group from 1998-2005. I was a founding member of the Society for Applied Philosophy (serving on its Executive Committee from its foundation in 1982 until well into the 1990s), a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the journalPhilosophy and Literature during the same period, and of the ‘Teaching Philosophy’ Committee of theFédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie through the 1990s until my retirement. I was a member of the Executive Committee of the Royal Institute of Philosophy from 1982-2005, continuing thereafter as a member of its Council until 2016; as part of my responsibilities, I was a member of the National Policy Committee for the 1988 World Congress of Philosophy, and also organized a series of conferences at Warwick for school teachers on different aspects of philosophy and its relationships with other disciplines.

In 1984 ‘Freddie’ (Sir Alfred) Ayer, ‘Griff’ (Warwick’s founding philosophy professor), and I produced an experimental series of video tapes on Ethics and Religion (I producing the analytical handbook), while in 1999 a colleague in the USA and I started a book series, now published by Routledge, Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology, which now runs to over twenty volumes. I have published three monographs,Philosophical Finesse (1989), A Philosophical Study of T S Eliot’s FOUR QUARTETS (1999), andThe Aesthetics of Argument (2016), together with six edited or co-edited volumes and various articles and reviews. For twenty years or so I was also a church bell ringer.

Andrea Selleri lives and works in Solihull. He got his PhD from the University of Warwick and was until recently an assistant professor of English language and literature in Turkey. He is especially interested in the intersections between literature and philosophy, and has edited two books on the topic, Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature: New Interdisciplinary Directions (Palgrave, 2016; with Philip Gaydon) and Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-century British Culture: Volume 3, the Later Victorian Period (Routledge, 2024). Some of his interdisciplinary work has also appeared in Philosophy and Literature, English Literary History, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture and other journals. His first monograph, The Author in Victorian Literary Culture, will very likely come out next year.