The Molloy University Philosophy Conference
featuring the North American Sartre Society
29th Annual Meeting
Call for Papers
October 25-27, 2024
Molloy University
*This conference will be fully hybrid*
Submission Deadline: July 15th, 2024
Conference Themes:
Existential Medicine & Existentialism and Disability
Keynote Speaker:
Jennifer Scuro
Jennifer Scuro received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research. She has taught Philosophy and Ethics for over 25 years and is now an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Molloy University. Her research applies the Continental tradition, including the existentialist tradition, to issues related to critical disability studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and bioethics, with new research on the intersection of disability and trauma.
She is the author of Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies (Lexington Books 2018) and The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (Rowman & Littlefield International 2017), the latter of which is a graphic novel narrative with a feminist philosophical analysis of pregnant embodiment and grief.
Her most recent publications include “The Postcolonial and the Post-Traumatic: Specters and Syndromes of White Feminist Canon” in the latest issue of philoSOPHIA: a Journal of trans Continental Feminism (Vol. 13, 2023) and the “Diagnosis” and “Trauma” entries for the collection, Keywords/Images in Graphic Medicine, (B. Martino & L. Diedrich, eds.) forthcoming with Penn State University Press.


The North American Sartre Society (NASS) is inviting proposals for our 29th meeting, taking place October 25-27, 2024 at Molloy University, in Rockville Centre, NY.

Our conference themes are Existential Medicine and Existentialism and Disability. We invite proposals on all topics related to these themes, including, but not limited to:
The overreliance on naturalism in modern medicine
Bad faith, authenticity, and the illness experience
How traditional existentialism does or does not account for the experiences of disability or neurodivergence
Existentialism and anti-psychiatry
Phenomenology of the illness experience, the body uncanny
The status of disability in Sartre’s ethics of integral humanity
Challenging ableist conceptions of the human in existentialism
Sartrean phenomenology and mental illness
Fanon, colonial mental illness, and decolonial phenomenology
Sartre’s own experience of disability
Diagnostic labels, facticity, and transcendence

In addition, we invite proposals from any area of Sartre studies and from any disciplinary background. In the spirit of Sartre’s eclectic thinking, we encourage proposals that address philosophy, literature, theater, aesthetics, psychology, politics, intellectual history, art, music, and other disciplines. Aiming to foster diverse and pluralistic approaches, we understand Sartre Studies broadly to indicate work in the existentialist tradition, including work emerging from thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Angela Davis, Albert Camus, Anna Julia Cooper, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Lewis R. Gordon, Frederick Douglass, Kathryn Sophia Belle, Steve Biko, Naomi Zack, Chabani Manganyi, Emilio Uranga, Jorge Portilla, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Keiji Nishitani, Azzedine Haddour, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas, Sara Ahmed, danielle davis, bell hooks, Kamau Brathwaite, Nathalie Etoke, Achille Mbembe, Suzanne Césaire, James Baldwin and others.
This conference is fully hybrid. Please indicate in your proposal whether you plan to present in person or remotely.
A limited number of stipends will be provided for graduate students and underemployed scholars who are attending in person. Please indicate in your proposal if you wish to be considered for a stipend.
Information on lodging and travel will be forthcoming.
The submission process is as follows:
The submission deadline is July 15th
We are accepting abstracts of 300-500 words. Reading time for papers is 20-25 minutes.
We will accept proposals for both individual papers and panel proposals.
English or French is acceptable
Please submit your abstract (or any questions) by email to NASS President, Kiki Berk, k.berk@snhu.edu
Graduate students are encouraged to submit.
All proposals will be forwarded to the program committee for review.

Contacts:
Kiki Berk, NASS President k.berk@snhu.edu
Kimberly S. Engels, Treasurer and Conference Host: kengels@molloy.edu
Dane Sawyer, NASS Co-President: dsawyer@laverne.edu
Damon Boria, NASS Executive Board Member: damon.boria@gmail.com
T Storm Heter, NASS Executive Board Member: sheter@esu.edu
Elizabeth Butterfield, NASS Executive Board Member: ebutterfield@georgiasouthern.edu
Jake Jackson, NASS Member at Large: jake.jackson.phd@gmail.com
LaRose Parris, NASS Member at Large: larose.parris@lehman.cuny.edu
A Shahid Stover, NASS Member at Large: brotherwisedispatch@gmail.com
NASS Webpage: https://www.northamericansartresociety.org
NASS Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SartreSociety/
Sartre Studies International https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/sartre-studies/sartre-studies-overview.xml