19th and 20th century Continental philosophy

Faculty from a variety of disciplines form a critical mass in this area, making the University of Kentucky an excellent institution at which to study 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy. The specialists in this area within the Philosophy Department are Stefan Bird-Pollan (Kant, Hegel), Natalie Nenadic (Hegel, Heidegger, Arendt), Eric Sanday (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), Robert Sandmeyer (Husserl), and Theodore Schatzki (Nietzsche, Life-philosophy, Heideggerian phenomenology, Wittgenstein, and post-structuralism).  (Note:  Professor Schatzki is in the Geography Department but is available to serve on dissertation committees.)  Faculty in other departments with interests in German and continental thought include: Jeff Rogers [German] (Frankfurt School, especially Adorno and Benjamin), Robert Jensen [Art] (Frankfurt School), Virginia Blum [English] (psychoanalytic literary theory, psychoanalytic theory, cultural theory), Herbert Reid [Political Science] (phenomenology and post-Marxism), Ernest Yanarella [Political Science] (phenomenology and post-Marxism), Carlos de la Torre [Sociology] (Political Sociology, Global Populism, Latin American Studies, Racism), and Dwight Billings [Sociology] (Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Habermas).

Philosophy Ph.D. students interested in German and Continental thought are encouraged to sample courses in other departments and to establish multidisciplinary dissertation committees. The W. T. Young Library at the University of Kentucky houses a superlative collection in German philosophy, including an extremely rich set of German language materials.