First Annual Luce Irigaray Conference

The Humanities Institute, The Department of Philosophy, and the Program in Women's Studies at Stony Brook University invite you to:

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LUCE IRIGARAY
The first annual conference of the Luce Irigaray Circle
September 22nd and 23rd, 2006
Stony Brook University, Manhattan Campus
401 Park Ave South (at 28th Street), New York, NY
Keynote Speakers: Tina Chanter, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University
Penelope Deutscher, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University

Presentations will concern topics such as ethics, politics, history of philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, architecture, fine arts, literature, spirituality, and gender. The Philosophy of Luce Irigaray is the first of a series of annual, interdisciplinary conferences, organized by the Luce Irigaray Circle, which aim to promote work on and inspired by the feminist philosopher, psychoanalyst and linguist Luce Irigaray. The conference is open to the public.

More on Keynote Speakers:
Tina Chanter was educated at The State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is author of Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Time, Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford University Press, 2001). She is also editor of Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (Rereading the Canon series, Pennsylvania State Press, 2001), and of the Gender Theory series for the State University of New York Press. Currently she is writing on abjection and film. She has written articles on feminist theory and continental philosophy, and has been invited to publish in such journals as Differences, Signs, The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, and Research in Phenomenology, on topics including Sophocles' Antigone, film theory, and figures such as Beauvoir, Derrida, Heidegger, Hegel, Irigaray, Kofman, Kristeva, Lacan, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty.

Penelope Deutscher (Ph.D University of New South Wales and DEA Paris I) taught at the University of New South Wales and at Australian National University before joining Northwestern in 2002 as Associate Professor of Philosophy. Her main fields of interest are twentieth century French philosophy (existentialism, deconstruction, French feminism); philosophy of gender and sexuality; and history of philosophy (Rousseau, Nietzsche). She is the author of Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (Routledge, 1997) and of A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Cornell UP, 2002). She is also the co-editor (with Kelly Oliver) of Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman; editor of Contemporary French Women Philosophers (a special issue of Hypatia, 2000) and of Repenser la politique (special issue of Les cahiers du Grif , with Françoise Collin, 2005). Deutcher spends regular research periods in Paris.

For more information on the conference and the Luce Irigaray Circle, visit the conference website
Or contact the conference chairwomen:
Mary C. Rawlinson rawlinson@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
Sabrina Hom shom@ic.sunysb.edu
Serene Khader skhader@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

I have never read Irigaray before, so I cannot provide much concerning her thought. However, some bio info: born in Belgium in the 1930's, but spent much time in Paris; she received her master's degree in pychoanalysis from Louvain, her first doctorate in Linguistics and a second in Philosophy. Her dissertation was entitled Speculum of the Other Woman and seems to be her major work in feminist philosophy. She since held a position as Chair of the Philosophy department at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She seems to have been very concerned with the ethics of sexual difference, hence one of her works with this title. Raising sexual difference to an ethical dimension interests me most about her, especially since she consulted some of the ethics of Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty. In any case, the conference should be interesting for those interested.

Here is a link to additional bio info with bibliography