About
Research and Teaching Interests
19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, Modern Jewish Thought, Philosophy of Race and Racism, Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality, Aesthetics and Culture Theory.
About Prof. Angermann
Asaf Angermann specializes in critical social philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, and aesthetics – mainly, but not only, in the continental philosophy tradition. He teaches and writes about topics in Critical Theory (Theodor W. Adorno, The Frankfurt School, and beyond), modern Jewish thought, as well as on philosophy of race and racism, and philosophy of gender and sexuality.
Born and raised in Israel, he studied at the universities of Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, and Frankfurt, and then crossed the pond for post-doctoral positions at the University of Toronto and at Yale University. At the University of Louisville, he teaches courses in Critical Social Theory, Modern Jewish Thought, Philosophy of Race and Racism, Philosophy of Love and Sexuality, Aesthetics, and more for the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Comparative Humanities.
He is the author of Damaged Irony: Kierkegaard, Adorno, and the Negative Dialectics of Critical Subjectivity (de Gruyter, 2014; selected for publication in Kierkegaard Studies, the official book series of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen), which has been praised in journals such as Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte/Journal of Religious and Cultural Studies and Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie/Review of Theology and Philosophy.
Prof. Angermann’s edition of the correspondence between Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem was published in 2015 with Suhrkamp (Adorno and Scholem’s original German publisher), and appeared in English translation, with his new introduction, with Polity Press in 2021. It is now included in the official series of Adorno’s Collected Works: Letters and Correspondence. Upon its publication, the volume was enthusiastically reviewed by philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who described the correspondence as a “documentation of one of the finest hours of German-Jewish intellectual history – after the Holocaust. The comments by editor Asaf Angermann, meticulously researched, are a reminder of the widely ramified network of relationships between a grand generation of German-Jewish intellectuals.” The book has received numerous favorable reviews in German, Spanish, Italian, and American newspapers and journals, including the New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Jewish Review of Books, and others,
Additionally, he translated into Hebrew (from German) Theodor W. Adorno’s book Education to Autonomy and Responsibility, which presents Adorno’s critical philosophy of education. The volume, which is the first ever book by Adorno to appear in Hebrew, includes Asaf Angermann’s comprehensive introduction and commentary.
Prof. Angermann has published on topics in Critical Theory, Philosophy of Race, Jewish philosophy, and feminist philosophy, most recently in Critical Philosophy of Race,The Journal of the American Academy of Religion,Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy, The Blackwell Companion to Adorno, and The Oxford Handbook to Adorno. Currently, he is completing new work on Critical Theory of Race, Gender, and Sexuality as well as on Black-Jewish relations