People

Seminar Director

Richard A. Cohen is Professor of Jewish Thought and Professor of Philosophy at University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA.  He has directed all seven Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminars (including 2018 NEH sponsored).  He is a leading Levinas scholar, author of several books on Levinas, the most recent of which are Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion (2010) and Out of Control: Confrontations between Spinoza and Levinas (2016), translator into English of four books by Levinas, and author of numerous articles in modern and contemporary continental philosophy.  He is co-editor, most recently, of The Politics of Humanity: Justice and Power (2021).

Seminar Co-Director

James McLachlan is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at Western Carolina University, USA. He has assisted at all seven Levinas philosophy Summer Seminars (including 2018 NEH sponsored Seminar). He is past co-chair of the Mormon Studies Group at the American Academy of Religion, member of the board of the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought, and organizer of the international Personalist Seminar. His research interests include 20th century Continental thought, especially Levinas, Sartre, and Berdyaev. He also publishes on American and European Personalism, Process Theology, Romanticism and idealism, and Mormon Theology.

Assisting Levinas Scholar

Jolanta Saldukaityte is Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, and Associate Professor of Philosophy, Philosophy Institute, University of Vilnius, Vilnius, Lithuania  Her teaching expertise is in ethics, contemporary continental philosophy (especially phenomenology) and media studies. She has published several articles on various aspects of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy.  Her research interests include phenomenology, ethics, theories of difference, and aesthetics.  She is a founding member and co-organizer of international Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminar (since 2013). Dr. Saldukaitytė is co-editor of Levinas Studies, Vol. 11 (Pittsburgh, 2017), and Religions, Vol. 9-10, special issue on “Levinas and the Political” (Switzerland, 2019). She is Vice-President of the Lithuanian Philosophical Association, a current member of the Lithuanian Association for Phenomenology, and a board member of the Lithuanian Philosophy Teachers Association.