Reading Group
Reading Group One: Weil and Politics
Frida Kahlo 'El marxismo dará salud a los enfermos' (1954) Oil on masonite.
“Prospects: Are we Headed for the Proletarian Revolution?” with Cristina Basili
Sessions will be 1.5 hours in length, 45 minutes for Dr. Basili to unpack her reading of the text and 45 minutes for general questions, answers, comments, and ideas. These sessions will be held on zoom and are open to all AWS members, so if you or anyone you know is interested in participating, please join the AWS. The sessions will be recorded, edited, and made available to the public via Youtube. More details to follow.
Cristina Basili is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow in Political Philosophy at the University of Bologna and a visiting researcher at The New School for Social Research in New York City, as part of the POLEM-WO project, “Reframing the Relationship between War and Politics with 20th Century Women Thinkers.” Her research combines the history of political thought, classical reception studies, and women’s and gender studies through an interdisciplinary approach. She previously held the position of assistant professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and was a DAAD postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bonn. Additionally, she served as an adjunct lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She has been a visiting scholar at the CNRS and EHESS in Paris, as well as at NSSR in NYC. She earned her international PhD in Humanities from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid with a dissertation on Leo Strauss’s Platonism (Doctoral Excellence Award, 2016). A member of several international research groups and networks, she has published extensively on a range of thinkers, including Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and María Zambrano. Among her recent publications: María Zambrano: perspectivas contemporáneas (ed., Escolar Editor, 2024) and Entre mística y política: la actualidad de Simone Weil (ed., Logos. Anales del Seminario de Metafísica, 2023).
Reading Group
Reading Group Two: Weil and Literature
John Collier. Clytemnestra after the Murder (1882). Oil on canvas, 239 × 174 cm (94 × 69 in). Guildhall Art Gallery, London.
“The Iliad or Poem of Force” with Cynthia Wallace
Sessions will be 1.5 hours in length, 45 minutes for Dr. Wallace to unpack her reading of the text and 45 minutes for general questions, answers, comments, and ideas. These sessions will be held on zoom and are open to all AWS members, so if you or anyone you know is interested in participating, please join the AWS. The sessions will be recorded, edited, and made available to the public via Youtube. More details to follow.
Cynthia R. Wallace is Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, where she also directs the Irene and Doug Schmeiser Centre for Faith, Reason, Peace, and Justice. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of contemporary women’s writing, religion, and ethics. She is author of the books Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering (Columbia UP, 2016) and The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion (Columbia UP, 2024). Her writing on Weil has also appeared or is forthcoming in Religion and Literature, Attention, the Kenyon Review, the Ploughshares blog, Commonweal, the Christian Century, and The Routledge Companion to Simone Weil.
Reading Group
Reading Group Three: Weil and God
“Forms of the Implicit Love of God” with Kate Lawson
Sessions will be 1.5 hours in length, 45 minutes for Dr. Lawson to unpack her reading of the text and 45 minutes for general questions, answers, comments, and ideas. These sessions will be held on zoom and are open to all AWS members, so if you or anyone you know is interested in participating, please join the AWS. The sessions will be recorded, edited, and made available to the public via Youtube. More details to follow.
Kathryn Lawson is a Faculty Fellow at King’s University College in Halifax in the first year program, department of humanities. She received her PhD from Queen’s University in Kingston, ON, where she worked as a lecturer and teaching assistant in the department of philosophy. She has worked as a lecturer at Carleton University, and Heritage CEGEP college. Kate’s book Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil: Decreation for the Anthropocene was published with Routledge’s Environmental Ethics series (2024). The book examines the philosophy of Simone Weil alongside the ecological ethics of the Anthropocene. Additionally, she acted as co-editor and contributor to a collection on the political philosophy of Weil and Hannah Arendt with Bloomsbury (2024). She has also published a number of chapters and peer reviewed articles on thinkers including Weil, Arendt, Jean Luc Marion, Edith Stein, Richard Kearney, and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Reading Group
Reading Group Four: Weil and Politics
Francisco de Goya. The Third of May 1808, 1814. Oil on canvas, 266 cm × 345 cm (105 in × 136 in). Museo del Prado, Madrid.
“On the Abolition of all Political Parties” with Scott Ritner
Sessions will be 1.5 hours in length, 45 minutes for Dr. Ritner to unpack his reading of the text and 45 minutes for general questions, answers, comments, and ideas. These sessions will be held on zoom and are open to all AWS members, so if you or anyone you know is interested in participating, please join the AWS. The sessions will be recorded, slightly edited, and made available to the public via Youtube. More details to follow.
Scott B. Ritner teaches Political Theory at University of Colorado Boulder. He earned his PhD from The New School for Social Research in 2018. Scott's research focuses on 20th and 21st Century Critical Social Theory, Race & Ethnic Politics, fascism and antifascism, and Popular Culture. His book manuscript, Revolutionary Pessimism, The Political Thought of Simone Weil is under advance contract with Stanford University Press. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters on Weil's political thought. When he is not researching or writing, you can (try to) find him in the mountains.
2025 Colloquy at Marquette University
The theme of this year’s colloquy – Simone Weil: Philosopher, Activist, and Mystic – represents central aspects of a person who oriented her philosophical exercise as an act of the intellectual spirit encountering others in their suffering reality and, from there, moving beyond history to the mystical manifestation of a crucified love.
Grad Student Workshop: Emily Griffiths
Please join us over Zoom to discuss the PhD work of Emily Griffiths and her chapter “Simone Weil’s Philosophical Medievalism”.