About

Laura Hengehold’s research explores the relationship between language, imagination and the lived experience of embodiment.  Her inquiry draws from three related discourses:

• Twentieth century French philosophy, particularly existentialism and the post structuralism of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
• Feminist philosophy and theories of sexuality
• The ongoing dialogue between African and European political thinkers

She is especially interested in the way political conflict and the organization of knowledge frame women’s experience of their own bodies as active forces or passive obstacles to joy.

Laura Hengehold is author of Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Individuation: The Problem of The Second Sex (Edinburgh University Press) and The Body Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault (Penn State University Press). In 2017, she co-edited The Blackwell Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Wiley/Blackwell) with Nancy Bauer, and African Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century: Acts of Transition with Jean Godefroy Bidima (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021).  A new book, Anonymity and Feminist Identity: Simone de Beauvoir’s Agon and Ours, will be forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in 2026.

Her translations include Kafka’s Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa (by Seloua Luste Boulbina) Law and the Public Sphere in Africa (by Jean-Godefroy Bidima) and Fugitive, Where are You Running? (by Dénètem Touam Bona).

For more information, see www.laura-hengehold-phil.com or http://case.academia.edu/LauraHengehold

Selected Recent Publications

2024. “Antinomies of Individuation in Contemporary African Thought,” Études Africaines: Langues et formes de la pensée, ed Mahougnon Kakpo. Cotonou: Les Éditions des Diasporas.

2022. “Phantasms and their Vicissitudes,” in The Politics of Desire: Foucault, Deleuze, and Psychoanalysis.  Ed. Agustín Colombo, Edward F. McGushin, and Geoffrey Pfeifer.  Rowman & Littlefield, International.

2021. “Gender between Kinship and Utopia.” In African Philosophy for the 21st Century: Acts of Transition, ed. Jean Godefroy Bidima and Laura Hengehold, Rowman & Littlefield International.

2019. “Die Philosophie der Individuation bei Simone de Beauvoir.” Trans. Peter Beyer. In special issue on “Das andere Geschlecht,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 69 (51), 34-38

2017. “Separation and Queer Connection in The Ethics of Ambiguity,“ in Blackwell Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer. Wiley-Blackwell, 286-298.

2015. “Revolution from Between:  Latour’s Reordering of Words and Things in We Have Never Been Modern”, Qui Parle? Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 24(1), 89-124.

2015. “Between Intuition and Genealogy:  A Problematic ‘Life,'” Journal  of Speculative Philosophy, special SPEP supplement, 29(3), 376-386.

2015. “Transnational Feminism and the Body of the Image in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” International Journal of Ethical Leadership 3, 67-79.

Selected Past Talks

“Ambiguities of Authentic Selfhood in Simone de Beauvoir,” Philosophy Colloquium series, James Madison University, March 2024.

“Monadic Reverberations in Simone de Beauvoir,” Deleuze Circle special session, Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Texas A&M University, October 2022.

“Angels in the Casino: On Walter Benjamin’s History-Making Machines,” 12th Annual Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference, London, July 2019.

“Gender Between Kinship and Utopia,” Association for Philosophy and Literature conference, Klagenfurt, Austria, May 2019.

“Autobiography and Feminist Imagination,” University of Ljubljana Department of Philosophy and Mesto Zensk (City of Women), October 2018.

“Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguities of Feminism,” Women’s History Month Keynote lecture, Roanoke College, March 2018.

“The Struggle for Individuation in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy and Novels,” CWRU World Literature Colloquium, March 2016.

“Cracking the Surface:  Methodological and Ethical Issues in Comparative Studies of Gendered Violence.” Seventh Annual Deluze Studies Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, July 14-16, 2014.

“L’histoire et la vie dans une perspective critique.” Vie et Éthique, de Bergson à Nous. Colloque du Cercle Camerounais de Philosophie, Université de Yaoundé I, Cameroon, November 21-22, 2013.

Courses Regularly Taught

PHIL 272 Art and Thought (CI)
PHIL 334/434 POSC 356/456 Social and Political Philosophy
PHIL 325/425 WGST 325/425 Philosophy of Feminism
PHIL 315/415 Selected Topics in Philosophy (e.g. Foucault)
PHIL 397/398/399/499 Directed Study/Capstone/Honors Thesis

Selected Capstones, Honors Theses, and Independent Studies (397/398/399/499)

Collected Unconscious (2025)
Spinoza’s Imagination and Politics in Networks of Digital Technology (2025)
Rethinking Determination: Deleuze, Kant, and Hegel in Dialogue (2024)
Ethical Terror: Rethinking Revolutionary Terrorism through Just War Theory (2024)
Nagarjuna and Kant (2024)
Disqualified Personhood: Alfred Schutz’s Phenomenological Social Theory in No Longer Human (2023)
Food for Thought: Can understanding food in phenomenological terms heal the
damages of contemporary American food culture? (2022)
Social Exclusion and Language: Towards an ethics of listening (2021)
The Epistemological Significance of a Centralized Database for Cleveland Ohio’s Non-Profit Sector, and its Moral Implications (2019).
Consciousness and the Self (2018)
The Sublimity of Possibility (2017-18)
Thinking like a Farm (2017)
Heidegger and Sartre on Ontology and History (2016)
Reading Reading Capital (2014-2015)
Adorno, Marcuse and the Frankfurt School (2013)
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (2013)
Philosophy of the Image in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol 1 (2012)
Justice and US Poverty Policy (2011)
Multiplying Interaction: On a Maxim of International Law Fostering Human Understanding (2009-2010)
Philosophy of Indian Feminisms (2010)
Unchoreography: Capoeira and the Reclamation of the Body Through Violence (2009)
Genealogy of Individualism (2009)
Transnational Filipina Workers and the Ethics of Care (2009)
Marxist Philosophy (2008)
Cosmopolitanism and Globalization (2007)
Perspectives on Pornography (2007)
Wittgenstein and Language (2004)
Liberalism and the Ohio Supreme Court on School Funding (2001)

Laura Hengehold is a contributing member to the Women and Gender Studies Program  and to the World Literature Program.

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