Biography
After receiving my Ph.D. in Divinity from Emmanuel College I spent the spring semester of 2016 teaching philosophy of religion and systematic theology at the Institute for Literature, Intellectual History and Religion at the University of Gothenburg. In Michaelmas 2016 I returned to Emmanuel College as a research fellow. In November 2020 I will be joining the "Ambivalence of Nordic Nature: Gift, Guilt, Grace" project (University of Oslo, Faculty of Theology) as Postdoctoral Research Fellow. My first book, Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), tackles the importance of Simone Weil’s concept of attention for critical theory and practice today, and situates it within the history of French reflexive or ‘spiritualist’ philosophy. I have also published widely on attention and environmental ethics, and am currently working, with Dr Alice Tarbuck, on a co-authored monograph addressing attention as a spiritual technology for the transformation of earth: Spellwork for a Damaged Planet: Magic and Ecology.
Research
Philosophy of religion; Environmental ethics; Magic and the occult
Publications
Kotva, S. (2020) Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury.
Kotva, S. (2019) The Occult Mind of Simone Weil. Philosophical Investigations 43/1-2: 122-141
Kotva, S. (2019) The Line of Resistance: Ravaisson and Bergson. Journal of Religion and Literature 49/2: 228-239.
Kotva S. (2019) Attention: Thomas A. Clark and Simone Weil', Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. 11(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/bip.732
Kotva, S. (2018) Attention in the Anthropocene: On the Spiritual Exercises of Any Future Science. In Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life. Eds Adam Bobbette and Amy Donovan. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kotva, S. (2018) One Question on Ritual and Religion. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79:3. 337-340.
Kotva. S. (2017) Sealanguage: Field Notes from the Anthropocene. PARSE Journal 6. 14-33
Kotva, S. and A. Tarbuck. (2017) The Non-Secular Pilgrimage: Walking and Looking in Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay’s The Road North. Critical Survey 29. 33-52.
Kotva, S. (2016) The God of Effort: Henri Bergson and the Stoicism of Modernity. Modern Theology 32/3. 397-420.
Kotva, S. (2015) Gilles Deleuze, Simone Weil, and the Stoic Apprenticeship: Education as A Violent Training. Theory, Culture & Society 32/7-8. 101-121.
Teaching and Supervisions
Undergraduate teaching
I supervise the following papers: A8 (Philosophy of Religion and Ethics), B10 (God, Freedom and the Soul), B11 (Ethics and Faith: The Good), C11 (Metaphysics)
Graduate teaching
Together with Dr Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal I teach the MPhil module Facing the Environmental Future: Theology in the Anthropocene.
Magic and Ecology
In 2019-2020 I ran the Anthropocene Reading Group, an interdisciplinary reading group addressing urgent cultural and environmental concerns. Our theme was MAGIC & ECOLOGY. In 2020-2021 MAGIC & ECOLOGY will be running as a CRASSH-funded virtual seminar series and an in-house art exhibition in April 2021, featuring the work of Charlotte Rodgers. The event is co-convened with Dr Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal and Dr Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe. Please visit the MAGIC & ECOLOGY website for further details.
