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Bryan Smyth

Instructional Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Bryan Smyth

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, with a special interest in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I am particularly interested in developing the philosophical complementarity between these traditions concerning the relation between nature and history, and showing how this can provide normative grounds for social critique and enable historical agency to be understood in ‘embodied’ terms. This has led me to investigate aspects of habit and myth, for example, as well as ‘heroism’ in the sense of prereflective ethical exemplarity (the subject of a planned monograph to be entitled Incarnating the Good: Rethinking Heroism as an Embodied Phenomenon). I have recently completed an annotated translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage(Northwestern, 2026), and I am planning a second monograph on Merleau-Ponty’s thought to be 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.

Publications

Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2014) [monograph]

The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953 (Northwestern University Press, 2020) [translation of Merleau-Ponty, with extensive critical notes and substantive introduction]

Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique (Lexington, 2021) [co-edited volume with substantive co-authored introduction]

Merleau-Ponty: An Ontology of the Imaginary (Springer, 2024) [translation of Annabelle Dufourcq, Merleau-Ponty: une ontologie de l’imaginaire]

Investigations into the Literary Use of Language: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953 (Northwestern University Press, 2026) [translation of Merleau-Ponty, with extensive critical notes and substantive introduction]

 

Courses Taught

Education

Ph.D. Philosophy, McGill University (2006)