Timothy MessenPhD StudentFrench

Timothy Messen is a first-year PhD student in the department of French and Italian. He has a BA from Dartmouth College in Comparative Literature (French and Russian) as well as a Master's degree in History of Philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure of Paris. He has worked on questions of spectrality, dialogism, and ethics in the works of Patrick Modiano and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Most recently, he re-read the Phaedo by way of Levinas to show that ethics foregrounds ontological discussions in Platonic philosophy. Now in his first year of his PhD at Emory, he looks forward to continuing his work on philosophy and literature. Of specific interest remain questions of ethics, particularly in the works of Édouard Glissant, as well as questions of state-formation, (non)violence, the Law, and anarchism.