Broken Middles

Robert Lucas Scott is an Arts Research Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Reading Hegel (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and a coeditor of Gillian Rose's Marxist Modernism lectures (Verso, 2024).

Rosie is a PhD candidate in Law at the University of Warwick and a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Social and Practical Philosophy, HU Berlin.

George Mather recently completed his DPhil in English Literature at the University of Oxford. He works on the intersection of literary and critical theory, philosophy and mathematics.

PhD Candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University, London. My PhD project title is 'Modalities of the Absolute: Spinoza, Hegel, Marx and Ecofeminism', supervisor Howard Caygill. My MA thesis was titled 'Structure and its Other: Lacan and Althusser' under the supervision of Etienne Balibar. My main topics of interest are the intersections between critical social theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory.

James Callahan (pen name: Crane) is a PhD student at Emory, writing a dissertation on Schelling’s “middle” works as a development in post-Kantian speculative thought. Recent work includes studies of the early Frankfurt School’s model of critical, Freudo-Marxian socio-psychology of fascist societies and liberal democracies. These studies are conducted through the Critical Theory Working Group (X: @crit_theory_grp), which holds open, bi-annual seminar and discussion sessions on critical theory.

Conrad Hamilton is a postdoctoral research fellow at East China Normal University. His works deals with the relation between social agency and the value form in the mature writings of Karl Marx. He is co-author of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson and author of the forthcoming Marxism contra Subjectivity. He has published in Jacobin, Sublation Magazine, Cosmonaut, Merion West, Areo, &&&, Morning Star, the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books and the South China Morning Post.

Michael Lazarus is author of Absolute Ethical Life (Stanford University Press, 2025) and editor of a forthcoming special edition of Thesis Eleven on Gillian Rose’s thought. He is currently postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University and visiting research fellow in Comparative Literature at Yale University.

Rocío Zambrana (University of Puerto Rico) writes on the epistemic and historical-material bases of capitalist modernity and its racial/gender order, with a focus on decolonial thought and praxis, particularly in relation to the Caribbean. She is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility (UCP, 2015) and Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Duke UP, 2021), translated as Deudas coloniales: el caso de Puerto Rico by Roque Salas Rivera (Editora Educación Emergente, 2022).

Jake Orbison is a graduate student at UC Berkeley. I study the interaction between critiques of value, art, and antisemitism that originated in the Frankfurt School and took hold of German and Anglophone theory.

Rachel Pafe is currently doing a joint PhD in modern Jewish philosophy at Goethe University of Frankfurt and University of Lille. Her research deals with sociologist and philosopher Gillian Rose. By tracing real and imagined conversations between Rose and thinkers such as Susan Taubes, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, and Daniel Bensaïd, she explores their understandings of and tensions around conceptualising postwar Jewish thought and political life. Her broader writing has been featured in publications including The Baffler, Vashti, Radical Philosophy, Marginalia Review of Books, Protocols, and the Conversationalist. She is part of the Night Sheyds* collective, a host for the Biography channel of New Books Network, and the editor of three multidisciplinary collections of poetry, criticism, and fiction published by Pseudo Press.

Kieran Brown completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford. He writes on the relation of language and economy, particularly in relation to Walter Benjamin. He is the author of articles published or forthcoming in Critique and Angelaki, and is the co-editor (with Wayne Stables) of Inflationary Modernities: Literature, Culture and Economy after 1789 (forthcoming 2025).

Kate Schick is Associate Professor of International Relations at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. Her research lies at the intersection of critical theory and international ethics. She is particularly interested in the way critical theories highlight our mutual vulnerability and interdependence, and their countercultural critique of the pursuit of invulnerability and self-sufficiency. Kate is author of Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice (2012) and co-editor of Subversive Pedagogies: Radical Possibility in the Academy (with Claire Timperley, 2022), The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations (with Amanda Russell Beattie, 2013) and Recognition in Global Politics: Critical Encounters between State and World (with Patrick Hayden, 2016). Kate facilitates relational pedagogical communities that foster deep learning, and her practice has been recognised via several teaching awards, including the British International Studies Association Award for Distinguished Excellence in Teaching (2022), and the Te Whatu Kairangi Aotearoa Tertiary Educator Award (2023).

Dr Robert Freeman is a lecturer in English at Lincoln College, Oxford. He has previously worked on literary and aesthetic value, African cinema, and the intersection of law and literature.

Louis Klee is an Australian writer and philosopher. He teaches at the University of Cambridge, where is a fellow and assistant professor at Trinity Hall. He was a JUNCTURE Fellow for the Sydney Review of Books, ‘a fellowship program presenting a series of new essays […] by leading critics’, where he wrote on everything from Australian historiography to the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s unlikely reception in Australia (with Christian Gelder). He has also held a visiting fellowship and writing residency at the Australian National University’s Centre for Australian Literary Cultures.

Elizabeth Li is an Assistant Professor in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Copenhagen.