Gina Zavota

Gina Zavota is Professor and Graduate Coordinator of Philosophy at Kent State University. She graduated magna cum laude with a B. A. in Philosophy from New York University, where she also studied painting and creative writing. In addition, she earned a degree in Mathematics from Hunter College (CUNY) before returning to philosophy and obtaining her Ph.D. from Stony Brook University.

While a doctoral student, she studied in Wuppertal, Germany for three years, two of which were supported by a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) fellowship. She has also lived and conducted research in Brussels and Leuven, Belgium, with a Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF) fellowship, and in Cairo as an associate of the American University in Cairo.

Her historical areas of specialization include 20th and 21st century Continental philosophy (particularly phenomenology and contemporary ontology), Ancient Greek philosophy, and classical Buddhist thought. She has thematic research interests in the philosophy of art, feminist theory and gender studies, metaphysics, the philosophy of science and mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and environmental philosophy. She is the co-editor (with Rudolf Bernet and Donn Welton) of the five-volume set, Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, and has published numerous scholarly articles and German translations. 

She was the co-organizer of the Husserl in a New Generation conference and served for seven years as grievance officer of the Kent State Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. In addition, she is a member of the Advisory Board of the Society for Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Science (SPPS). She is currently completing a manuscript on Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology and editing anthologies on Husserlian phenomenology and on Neoplatonic philosophy and the arts.

Her most cited articles include:

1. “Given (No) Time: A Derridean Reading of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival,” Film-Philosophy 24:2 (2020): 185-203.
2. “A Feminist Approach to The Visible and the Invisible through Karen Barad’s Agential Realism,” Acta Structuralica Special Issue 2 (2018): 147-169.
3. “Plotinus' "Reverse" Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem of Emanation Imagery,” in Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics, ed. Abraham Jacob Greenstine and Ryan Johnson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2017).
4. “Expanding the Extended Mind: Merleau-Ponty’s Late Ontology as Radical Enactive Cognition,” Essays in Philosophy 17.2 (2016): 94–124.
5. “The Importance of Number in Husserl’s Early Theory of Time-Constitution,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 40.2 (2009): 188–206.