Professor Alia Al-Saji

IAS Fellow at St Cuthbert’s Society, Durham University (October – December 2012)

Alia Al-Saji is associate professor of Philosophy at McGill University. Her philosophical research brings together and critically engages 20th century phenomenology and French philosophy, on the one hand, and contemporary critical race and feminist theories, on the other. Running through her research is an abiding concern for the themes of time and embodiment, the intersection of which Professor Al-Saji seeks to philosophically elaborate.

While her doctoral research at Emory University, completed in 2002, focused on the German phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Professor Al-Saji has since published extensively in the areas of French phenomenology and philosophy – on the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular – as well as in the field of feminist theory. She has published in journals such as Continental Philosophy Review, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Research in Phenomenology, Southern Journal of Philosophy, and the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology.

In 2009, Professor Al-Saji was awarded a fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France to carry out her research, and since 2009, she has been a fellow at the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas at McGill University. Professor Al-Saji was elected to the executive committee of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), the second largest philosophical association in North America in 2009. She is currently a co-editor of the Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy, and the Feminist Philosophy section editor of Philosophy Compass.

Professor Al-Saji’s research traces two interrelated trajectories. The first trajectory of her research explores questions of embodiment, memory and intersubjectivity in terms both of affectivity and perception.