The Spontaneity of Freedom

    Team

    Principal Investigator

    Jonathan Gingerich is Associate Professor of Law and Associate Graduate Faculty in Philosophy at Rutgers University and PI for SPONT. His research on spontaneous freedom aims to theorise the freedom of acting in unplanned and unscripted ways and explore its implications for ethics, politics, law, and technology. An overview of this project is provided by his recent paper in Ethics.

    International Academic Advisory committee

    Matthew Congdon is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in ethics, social philosophy, and aesthetics, and his work is unified by an overarching interest in moral change. His book, Moral Articulation: On the Development of New Moral Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2024) explores how historically shifting languages and concepts alter the landscape of shared ethical life. Ongoing and future work includes projects on the role of emotions in moral change, struggles for recognition, and the aesthetic dimensions of moral address. He also has scholarly interests in the ethical writings of Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch.

    Daniela Dover is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers. She has recently written papers about curiosity, love, conversation, and interpersonal influence. She is currently writing a book about how our ideas of the self interact with our conceptions of democratic community.

    Jacques Lezra is Distinguished Professor of English and Hispanic Studies at the University of California—Riverside and 2022-23 Chaire Internationale de Philosophie Contemporaine at University of Paris-8. His monographs include, most recently, Disciplina moriendi: Derrida, la mediación ‘hispana’ (Santiago, 2024) and Defective Institutions: A Protocol for the Republic (Fordham, 2024). He is Editor of the online journal “Political Concepts.” With Paul North, he edits Fordham University Press’s series IDIOM. With Emily Apter and Michael Wood, he edited Princeton University Press’s edition of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2014). Lezra’s other translations include Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (into Spanish); Alain Badiou’s Seminaire L’Un (into English); and Étienne Balibar, Des universels (into Spanish). He is completing work on a book titled, for now, The Politics of Little Words.

    Charles Petersen is the Harold Hohbach Historian at the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. He has also served as a visiting assistant professor and Klarman postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University; he received his PhD at Harvard in 2020. In addition to his academic work, he has served as an editor at n+1 magazine, an internationally recognized journal of politics and culture based in New York, for more than fifteen years. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Review of Books. He also maintains a semi-regular newsletter, “Making History.” 

    Francey Russell is an assistant professor of philosophy at Barnard College and Columbia University.  She works in moral psychology and has recently published papers on Kant and Freud, on Iris Murdoch’s moral psychology, on shame in the work of Annie Ernaux, and several papers on film and philosophy.  She is writing a manuscript on self-opacity and the positive role it can play in our ethical and aesthetic lives.

    Vida Yao is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UCLA. She received her PhD in philosophy from UNC Chapel Hill, and her BA in philosophy from the University of British Columbia. She works in ethics and moral psychology with a special focus on the emotions and the nature of the self, as well as the methodology of philosophical ethics. Her recent work focuses on love and interpersonal connection, and two of her articles on these topics, “Grace and Alienation” (2020) and “Eros and Anxiety” (2023) were selected by the Philosophers’ Annual.  She organizes and hosts the Los Angeles Workshop in Humanistic Ethics. 

    Deputy Director and Associate Researcher

    Kirstine la Cour works on interpersonal normativity, broadly construed. Her dissertation project, The Pursuit of Repair, argues that the pursuit of interpersonal moral repair in the wake of wrongdoing is fundamentally a pursuit of mutual understanding. Her ongoing and prospective projects concern creative and self-creative agency,  the social character of communication, and the ethics of normative contestation and development. From October 2025, she will be Career Development Fellow in Philosophy at Trinity College Oxford.