Office: Stabler Hall, Room 406
Phone: 501-916-6309
Email: mbnorton@ualr.edu
Michael Norton joined the UA Little Rock Department of Philosophy & Interdisciplinary Studies faculty in 2012. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Villanova University in 2011, and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School in 2003. He specializes in philosophy of religion and contemporary Continental philosophy – particularly phenomenology and deconstruction. His research draws on deconstruction and recent materialist perspectives with the goal of constructing a philosophical understanding of religious traditions through concrete practices, with an emphasis on pluralism. His work currently in progress aims to draw a new understanding of religious life and thought in the context of contemporary ecological crises.
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
“On Hospitality In and Beyond Religions and Politics,” Derrida Today 8(2): 2015.
[DOI: 10.3366/drt.2015.0111]
“Matter and Machine in Derrida’s Account of Religion,” Sophia 54(3): 2015.
[DOI: 10.1007/s11841-014-0452-y]
“The Spectral Dilemma and the Instauration of the Divine: Latour contra Meillassoux,” ThéoRèmes 6: 2014. [DOI: 10.4000/theoremes.626]
“The Aporias of Justice and the Virtue of Un-inheritance,” Philosophia 41(2): 2013.
Book Chapters
Co-authored with Jana McAuliffe: “The Queer Theology of the Doom Patrol,” Theology and the DC Universe, ed. McKee and Abraham (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023).
“Recomposing Religion: Radical Agnosticism and Transformative Speech,” The Relational Dynamics of Enchantment and Sacralization, ed. Utriainen, et al. (Sheffield: Equinox, 2016).
Co-authored with Cynthia Nielsen: “Contributions from Philosophy,” Oxford Handbook of Theology, Sexuality, and Gender, ed. Thatcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Encyclopedia Article
“Religious Pluralism,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016).
Book Reviews
Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2013), in Interstitial Journal: October 2013.
Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011), in Expositions: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 6(1): 2012.
Santiago Zabala, The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics (New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 2009), in Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy IV: 2012.
