Second Annual Levinas Society Conference
June 10-12, 2007
Purdue University
Plenary Speakers
Oona Eisenstadt (Ph.D., McMaster Univ.) is Fred Krinsky Professor of Jewish Studies and Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Pomona College. Her areas of specialization include Contemporary continental philosophy, modern Jewish philosophy, Judaism and political theory, and children's literature. She has published Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas's Postmodernism (Duquesne Univ. Press, 2001), and several book chapters and journal articles.
David Hansel is in the Department of Neurophysics and Physiology, CNRS, and Université RenéDescartes, Paris. He works on the dynamics of large neural networks and models of visual cortex. He is the grandson of Emmanuel Levinas.
Georges Hansel is Professor Emeritus at the Universitéde Rouen. He is Emmanuel Levinas's son-in-law, and is author of Explorations Talmudiques (Editions Odile Jacob, 1998) and co-author (with Cristian Ciocan) of Levinas Concordance (Springer, 2005).
Joëlle Hansel, a former student at Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and UniversitéLa Sorbonne (Ph.D.), teaches philosophy and Jewish Thought in Jerusalem. She is the founder of the Raissa and Emmanuel Levinas Center (Jerusalem). She has organized three international Levinas conferences at the Hebrew University: "Levinas in Jerusalem" (May 2002), "Ethics and Politics in the Philosophy of E. Levinas" (June 2003), "A Century with Levinas. Resonances of a Philosophy" (January 2006). Among her publications: Moïse Hayyim Luzzatto. Kabbale et philosophie (Editions du Cerf, 2004), Levinas. De l'Etre &agave; l'Autre, (editor, PUF, mars 2006) and recently, Levinas in Jerusalem. Philosophical Interpretations and Religious Perspectives (editor, Magnes Press, Jerusalem). Her fields of interest are the intellectual history of Judaism, French contemporary philosophy and E. Levinas'work. She is the granddaughter of Emmanuel Levinas.
George Kunz (Ph.D., Duquesne Univ.) is Professor in the Department of Psychology at Seattle University. He has published The Paradox of Power and Weakness: Levinas and an Alternative Paradigm for Psychology (SUNY Press, 1998), and numerous book chapters and journal articles. He is director of the successful annual conference, "Psychology for the Other," which takes place at Seattle University.
Simone (Levinas) Hansel is the daughter of Emmanuel Levinas.
William Paul Simmons (Ph.D., Louisiana State Univ.) is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University. Simmons is author of An-Archy and Justice: An Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas's Political Thought (Lexington, 2003), an invited contribution to Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture: "The Ethics and Politics of Liberation: Essays on Enrique Dussel" (Winter 2008), as well as recent law review articles on transnational legal remedies for the femicides in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. He is currently working on a book-length manuscript that examines the nexus between contemporary political thought and international human rights law.