Discover new ways of thinking about art and the everyday
Dive into philosophy’s modern impact on society as a whole with Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics. Begin with Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South to understand the global roots, context, and counterparts of traditional aesthetic theories. Then utilize exclusive case studies, primary texts, banks of images, and secondary readings for further in-depth exploration of global aesthetics. .
"Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics offers students and researchers an engaging entry into robust scholarship and innovative thinking in contemporary aesthetics. This user-friendly resource should have a place in academic libraries." — Library Journal, 2023
"A worthy collection to explore for a library that serves undergraduates. Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics' topics span across disciplines and I would recommend a trial to promote to faculty outside of philosophy to those teaching writing, film, or any interdisciplinary courses taught on campus." — Against the Grain, 2023
heather ahtone is Senior Curator at First Americans Museum (FAM) in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She examines the intersection between Indigenous cultural knowledge and contemporary art. Working in the Native arts community since 1993, she has curated numerous exhibits, publishes regularly, and continues to seek opportunities to broaden discourse on global contemporary Indigenous arts. She is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and descended from the Choctaw Nation.
Norman Akers is a Native American (Osage Nation) visual artist who uses visual narrative to explore issues of identity, culture, place, and transformation in his work. His work resides in the permanent collections of museums throughout America, from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, to the Heard Museum, in Phoenix, AZ. He received his MFA in Painting from the University of Illinois and teaches in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas.
Paloma Atencia-Linares is Associate Professor at UNED, Madrid. She was previously Permanent Research Fellow at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Lecturer at the University of Kent, UK. Paloma works on various areas within the Philosophy Art but specializes in the philosophy of photography and pictorial arts as well as in the philosophy of fiction and narratives. She is also editor—together with Derek Matravers--of the British Journal of Aesthetics.
Sondra Bacharach is an associate professor of philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Her current aesthetic research interests include authorship, street art, and hair aesthetics, and have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The British Journal of Aesthetics and The Monist.
Christopher Bartel is a Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University and an Adjunct Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University. His research interests primarily lie within ethics and aesthetics, with a special focus on music and video games. He is the author of Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time (Bloomsbury 2020).
Elisa Caldarola works on the philosophy of contemporary visual arts, on depiction, and on the meta-ontology of art. Some of her papers have appeared in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Ergo, and Open Philosophy. A former Fulbright scholar, she obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Padua, has conducted research at the Universities of Oxford and Santiago de Compostela, and has held positions at the University of Padua.
Wesley D. Cray is an educator, counselor, consultant, and former philosophy professor. She likes to think about music, stories, gender, nutritionally complete food powder, and the ultimate nature of reality. Her book Philosophy of Comics: An Introduction, co-authored with Sam Cowling, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Press. She likes to watch horror movies, play videogames, and read comics with her dogs and cats.
E.M. Dadlez has a PhD in Philosophy from Syracuse University and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma. Her work is mainly on the philosophy of art and literature, and on topics at the intersection (sometimes, more accurately, the collision) of aesthetics, ethics and epistemology. She is the author of various articles on aesthetics and feminist ethics, as well as What's Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (Penn State Press) and Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume (Wiley-Blackwell). She is the editor of Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press).
Johnathan Flowers is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy & Religion at American University. Flowers’ research areas include African American intellectual history, Japanese Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Technology. His current research focuses on the affective ground of experience, identity, and personhood through pragmatism and Japanese aesthetics with a specific emphasis on race, gender, and disability as felt orientations in and towards the world.
Cynthia Freeland is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Houston. She has published on topics in ancient philosophy, feminist philosophy, film theory, and aesthetics. Her books include Philosophy and Film, co-edited with Thomas Wartenberg (Routledge, 1995), Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (Penn State, 1998), The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Westview, 1999), But Is It Art? (Oxford, 2001) and Portraits and Persons (Oxford, 2010). From 2014-2016 she served as president of the American Society for Aesthetics.
Theodore Gracyk is the author of a number of books on philosophy of art and music, including On Music (Routledge 2013). He co-edited The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (Routledge 2011) and was co-winner of the 2002 Woody Guthrie Prize for I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity (Temple University Press, 2001). He also conducts research on the history of aesthetics and has published on David Hume, Thomas Reid, and Edward Hanslick, among others.
James R. Hamilton works on aesthetic issues and issues in the philosophy of art at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, USA. An empirically and formally oriented philosopher, his work is informed by related work in fields like decision theory, formal learning theories, cognitive-neuroscience, -psychology, -anthropology, and -history. He has published entries and articles in various encyclopedias, companions, as well as leading journals in aesthetics. Those can be found at https://ksu.academia.edu/JamesHamilton.
Darren Hudson Hick works centrally in the overlap between the philosophy of art and intellectual property law. He is the author of Artistic License: The Philosophical Problems of Copyright & Appropriation (Chicago, 2017) and Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Bloomsbury, 2022), and coeditor of The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying (Bloomsbury, 2016).
Lisa Jones is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where she works in the philosophies of art and literature. Her research has ranged across issues within these fields, including the nature and value of fiction and narrative, the aesthetics and ethics of appropriation art, and – most recently – the artistic aspects of pro wrestling.
Jason Leddington is a Swedish-American philosopher and Associate Professor at Bucknell University. He writes on perception (mainly on hearing and sound) and issues in aesthetics and philosophy of art (mainly on magic and other arts of impossibility, but also on music). In his spare time, he climbs rocks with his wife and (sometimes) does card tricks.
Dominic McIver Lopes FRSC loves teaching philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He also loves writing philosophy, and has put out books on images and their value, new artistic technologies, the nature and value of art, and all aspects aesthetic life and why they matter to us. His work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Killam Trust through the Canada Council.
Prof. Eva Man is currently the Director of Film Academy and Chair Professor in Humanities of Hong Kong Baptist University. She publishes widely in comparative aesthetics, comparative philosophy, woman studies, feminist philosophy, cultural studies, art and cultural criticism. She was a Fulbright scholar and was named AMUW Woman Chair of Marquette University in the US. She contributes public services to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong Museums Advisory Committee and Hong Kong Public Libraries.
Jennifer A. McMahon is Professor in Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She has authored monographs Art and Ethics in a Material World (Routledge 2014) and Aesthetics and Material Beauty (Routledge 2007); edited Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment (Routledge 2018); and edited special journal issues in Curator: The Museum Journal (62/1, 2019); and the Australasian Philosophical Review (March 2017). Her most recent reference article is “Beauty” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2020.
Henry John Pratt is an Associate Professor of philosophy at Marist College. He received his B.A. in English and philosophy from the University of Vermont (1995) and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Ohio State University (2005). Within aesthetics and the philosophy of art, his main research interests include artistic value, popular art forms such as comics and film, narrative, and beards.
Laura Sizer is Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College in the United States. She writes on a broad range of topics in aesthetics, affect, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. Among other works she has authored “The Art of Tattoos” in The British Journal of Aesthetics and “Sad Songs Say So Much: the Paradoxical Pleasures of Sad Music” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
Brian Soucek is Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches constitutional law, art law, antidiscrimination law, and civil procedure. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University and his JD from Yale Law School. His articles and essays, including work at the intersection of law and aesthetics, are available at https://law.ucdavis.edu/faculty/soucek/.
Deborah Tollefsen is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of mind, social epistemology, and aesthetics. Her book Groups as Agents was published by Polity Press in 2015.
Sarah E. Worth is a professor of philosophy at Furman University where she teaches classes about aesthetics and food, and the aesthetics of food. She published In Defense of Reading (2017) and Taste: A Philosophy of Food (2021) in addition to several other academic articles. She takes students every year to Italy to teach classes about the Slow Food Movement where she learned about the magic of olive oil, the importance of fresh ingredients, and loves the community around food that the Italians have. She aspires to become Italian.
