Magdalena Zolkos is Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe-University Frankfurt. She is a political theorist, working across the fields of politics, philosophy and literature, and specializing in memory politics, heritage restitution, memory and material objects, trauma theory, and testimony. Her current research project on post-colonial repatriation on indigenous cultural heritage identifies epistemic biases within the juridical-liberal restitutive model and draws on anti-colonial struggles and discourses to critique and radicalize heritage repatriation. She is also an honorary research associate at Unit for Global Justice at Goldsmiths as part of collaborative project on radical political imaginaries.
Magdalena Zolkos is the author of Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2020), and co-editor (with M. La Caze) of Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch: On What Cannot Be Touched (Lexington, 2019) and (with G.Roelvink) of Sentient Subjects:Post-humanist Perspectives on Affect (Routledge, forthcoming).
Email: Zolkos@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Project
Humboldt Research Fellowship Programme for Experienced Researchers (2019), “Restitution of Cultural Property in Greenland, Sápmi and Ingria: Comparative Study of Repatriation Politics, Collective Memorialization, and Indigenous Philosophies of Relatedness”
Selected Publications
Magdalena Zolkos, Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-restitution-and-the-politics-of-repair-hb.html
Magdalena Zolkos, “Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees and Post-Colonial Trauma Criticism,” Textual Practice, 2020, 34(1): 147-168.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1508062?af=R
Magdalena Zolkos, “The ‘Endangered Voices’ of the Taiwanese Victims of Japanese Sexual Slavery: Towards Post-Colonial Feminist Ethics of Listening to Trauma,” Public Philosophy Journal, 2020, 2(2): 1-10.
https://publications.publicphilosophyjournal.org/record/?issue=6-18-224914&kid=6-15-224934
Magdalena Zolkos, “Bereft of Interiority: Motifs of Vegetal Transformation, Escape and Fecundity in Luce Irigaray’s Plant Philosophy and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian,” SubStance, 2019, 48(2): 102-118.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/731479/summary
Marguerite LaCaze and Magdalena Zolkos, eds. Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch: On What Cannot Be Touched (Langham: Lexington Press, 2019).
Magdalena Zolkos, “‘After You Died I Could Not Hold a Funeral, and so My Life Became a Funeral’: Catastrophic Aftermaths in Han Kang’s Human Acts,” in Robert Kusek, Beata Piątek, and Wojciech Szymański, eds., Aftermath: The Fall and the Rise after the Event (Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2019): 63-76.
Magdalena Zolkos, “Registers of Undesirability, Poetics of Detention. Jean Améry on the Jewish Exile and Behrouz Boochani on the Manus Prison,” in Yochai Ataria and Eli Pitcovski, eds., Jean Améry. Beyond the Mind’s Limits (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019): 55-84
Magdalena Zolkos, “Life as a Political Problem: The Post-Human Turn in Political Theory,” Political Studies Review, 2018, 16(3): 192-204 (review essay).
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1478929917720431
Magdalena Zolkos, “‘The Return of Things as They Were’: New Humanitarianism, Restitutive Desire and the Politics of Unrectifiable Loss,” Contemporary Political Theory, 2017, 16(3): 321-341.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fs41296-016-0010-1
Magdalena Zolkos, “Porous Skins and Tactile Bodies: Juxtaposition of the Affective and Sentimental Ideal of the Subject,” Humanities, 2016, 5(3): 77-90.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/77
Magdalena Zolkos, “Justice, the Confessional, and the Violin: Objects and Object-Mediated Relations of Loss in Jaume Cabré’s Confessions,” in Chris Andrews and Matt McGuire, eds., Post Conflict Literature: Human Rights, Peace and Justice (London: Routledge, 2016): 213-226.
Joanne Faulkner and Magdalena Zolkos, eds., Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity: Disciplining the Child (Langham: Lexington Press, 2015).
Magdalena Zolkos, “‘Ancestral Guilt’: Childhood as Redemption and the Descendants of Nazis in German Cultural Memory,” Joanne Faulkner and Magdalena Zolkos, eds., Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity: Disciplining the Child (Langham: Lexington Press, 2015): 39-60.
Magdalena Zolkos, “Aporias of Belonging: Jean Améry on ‘Being a Jew without Judaism’ and the Tradition of Conscious Pariah,” Journal of European Studies, 2014, 44(4): 362-377.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0047244114536825
Magdalena Zolkos, “Apocalyptic Theory of Witnessing in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones,” Monica Germana and Aris Mousoutzanis, eds., Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture. Post-Millennial Perspectives on the End of the World (London: Routledge, 2014): 148-161.
Magdalena Zolkos, “‘Un petit geste’. Silence and Gesturality in Shoah,” Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson, eds., Traumatic Affect (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013): 59-79.
Gerda Roelvink and Magdalena Zolkos, “Climate Change as Experience of Affect,” Angelaki, 2011, 16(4): 43-57.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0969725X.2011.641344
Magdalena Zolkos, ed., On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe (Langham: Lexington Press, 2011).
https://rowman.com/Action/Search/_/Zolkos
Anna Yeatman, Paul Hansen, Magdalena Zolkos, and Charles Barbour, eds., Action and Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt (New York: Continuum, 2011).
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/action-and-appearance-9781441186805/
Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life. Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kértesz (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/reconciling-community-and-subjective-life-9781441160508/
Email: Zolkos@em.uni-frankfurt.de