Mitchell Damian Murtagh

PhD Candidate at Duke University in the Program in Literature and a Feminist Studies

Mitchell Damian Murtagh is a PhD Candidate at Duke University in the Program in Literature and a Feminist Studies certificate student. Their research interests include feminist new materialism, the philosophy of sexual difference, ontologies of becoming, complicating the relationship between materialism and idealism, and non-hierarchical renderings of process and emergence. Critiquing the effect of hylomorphism in the history of Western metaphysics, M.D. rethinks the relationship between form and matter using examples from quantum and nuclear physics. Their dissertation, “Matter’s Constitutive Matrix: A Feminist Cosmology of Primary Form, Incorporeality, and Nucleogenesis,” offers a feminist analysis of theconstitution of the primordial elements through the event of the Big Bang as a primary example of matter’s capacity for self-formation and organization. They received a B.A. in Philosophy from Rutgers University- New Brunswick in 2012.