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Purpose of the Center

The Phenomenology Research Center is a collaborative community of learning that hosts national and international graduate students, post-doctoral students, as well as junior and senior scholars. Located in Stony Brook, New York at Stony Brook University, the Center accommodates interdisciplinary perspectives, and focuses on joint research as a way of informing individual study.

The Center is located at Harriman Hall, 248.

Examples of Current and Recent Research at the Center:

  • Expression and Human Rights
  • Political Identity and Memory
  • Religious Experience
  • Representation and Social Anthropology
  • Time, Movement, and the Body
  • Neuropathology and Psychology
  • Vocation

The Center is directed by Professor Anthony J. Steinbock.

Our goals are:

  1. To promote original phenomenological investigations by conducting theme-based phenomenological workshops. The Phenomenology Research Center hosts the Phenomenology Research Group (PRG).  The PRG meetings are carried out every other week on Tuesdays, and are centered on current “research projects” (see II. below).
  2. To foster the collaborative and communal study of classical texts in phenomenology. A weekly seminar is devoted to close textual readings of a featured major work in phenomenology (e.g., by Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas).
  3. To support article publications, dissertation research, and book publications. The Center offers an atmosphere of focused study and discussion with national and international researchers.  It provides office space to researchers and access to the University’s Morris Library as well as to Interlibrary Loan.
  4. To advance the translation of major works in phenomenology. Because of the international nature of phenomenological work, the Center (a) supports the translation of works (e.g., from French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Japanese) into English.  Where foreign visitors are concerned, the Center (b) provides a forum for the translation of phenomenological works in the English language into the visiting scholar’s native language.
  5. To conduct colloquia. Regularly scheduled colloquia supplement the Tuesday workshop meetings.  The colloquia are held by the participants of the Center and are based on the participants own work.  The colloquia and discussions are open to the broader SIUC community.
  6. To sponsor conferences devoted to particular themes of import to the Center. Interactive dialogue is cultivated through conferences on themes actively investigated at the Center, highlighting concerns and areas of interest represented by the participants and visiting scholars. Selected papers from the conference will be published as a book project.