Dr Ariane Mildenberg

BA, MA, Copenhagen; PhD, York 

Ariane Mildenberg’s research focuses on kinships of both method and concern between phenomenology - the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eugen Fink and Hannah Arendt - and modernist literature and art. 

Other interests include the interaction of contemporary philosophy with theology and the relationship between modernism and postcolonial writing. She is the author of Modernism and Phenomenology: Literature, Philosophy, Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) which brings into conversation the work of a range of philosophical and artistic-literary figures, showing how phenomenology and modernism are inextricably interlaced. She is editor of Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2018), a large volume that presents close readings of Merleau-Ponty’s key texts, explores modernist works in light of his thought, and provides an extended glossary of the philosopher’s key concepts and terms. 

In 2010, she co-edited (with Carole Bourne-Taylor) Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond (Peter Lang), an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring a variety of modernist issues, gravitating around the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Henry and Paul Ricoeur. She is currently working on a monograph on the dialogue between modernist and postcolonial literature, focusing on how selected modernist and postcolonial writers break down the hierarchies and binaries within language itself, questioning existing ideas concerning the contrasts between modernist and postcolonial writing and exploring new ground by investigating their affinities.  

• The interaction of modernist literature and art with 20th-century philosophy, especially phenomenology; 
  
• the dialogues between modernist and postcolonial literature; 
  
• the relations between the verbal and the visual in both twentieth century literature and art. 

Dr Mildenberg is particularly interested in supervising research projects on modernist literature and poetry within various philosophical, theoretical and comparative frameworks, including modernist philosophy, aesthetics and art. She also supervises research on the relations between modernist and postcolonial literature. Recently, she mentored Dr Christin Hoene's three-year Leverhulme-funded project 'Colonial Soundscapes and Non-Western Modernities' (2016-2019).

Dr Mildenberg is a member of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology and the Modern Language Association. She has acted as a reader for Routledge and Bloomsbury and as a peer reviewer for Age, Culture, Humanities and Poetics Today.

Dr Mildenberg has organised and co-organised numerous academic conferences and symposia, including 'Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace,' the 28th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Kent, 2018); 'Cross-Disciplinary Phenomenology: A Readiness for the Questionable' (Kent, 2016); 'Material Meanings,' the 12th Conference of the European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (Kent, 2012); and 'Phenomenology and Modernism' (Oxford, 2006).