Bryan Smyth

Instructional Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Email:
basmyth@olemiss.edu
Office Location:
13 Bryant Hall
Phone:
662-915-7020

I teach a variety of Philosophy courses in the Department of Philosophy and Religion.

Research Interests

My research deals primarily with Critical Theory (broadly construed) and phenomenology (especially the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which, among other things, foregrounds questions of embodiment), especially areas of philosophical complementarity between these traditions. I am particularly interested in questions concerning the relation between nature and history, and how such questions relate to the normative grounds of radical social critique and the possibility of socially transformative historical agency. This has recently led me to investigate aspects of habit and myth, as well as ‘heroism’ in the sense of prereflective ethical exemplarity (the subject of a planned monograph tentatively entitled Incarnating the Good: Rethinking Heroism as an Embodied Phenomenon). I have recently completed the translation of Annabelle Dufourcq’s Merleau-Ponty: une ontologie de l’imaginaire (Springer), and I am working on an annotated translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage (Northwestern). I am also planning a further monograph on Merleau-Ponty’s thought tentatively entitled Hyperdialectical Materialism: Nature and History in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology.

Biography

I did my BA and MA the University of Waterloo, and received my PhD from McGill University in 2006. During my undergraduate studies I spent a year at Karl-Franzens-Universität (Graz, Austria), and while pursuing my PhD I also earned a DEA (Diplôme d’études approfondies) at the Sorbonne (Université Paris I) in 2003. I held visiting teaching positions at Mount Allison University and the University of Memphis before coming to the University of Mississippi in 2013.