NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

Isa Jacobs is a philosopher and translator based in Barcelona. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy, German-Jewish Studies and Translation Theory (ERC-funded) at Pompeu Fabra University, and Associate Editor of Studies in East European Thought. Her research brings philosophy into dialogue with visual culture and the history of science, exploring how ideas travel across intellectual traditions and cultural contexts. She holds a PhD from the University of London, supervised by Galin Tihanov, and has held visiting research fellowships at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, and the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig. She has published and lectured widely across Europe, the United States and China, and is actively engaged in collaborations. She is a co-founder of Soviet Temporalities, an international research network examining conceptions of time in Soviet thought, and an Affiliated Member of the Aleksanteri Research Group for Intellectual History at the University of Helsinki. She is co-editor of Alexandre Kojève and Gaston Fessard: Authority, History, and Political Theology (Bloomsbury, 2026) and a special issue on Kojève and Russian philosophy (Studies in East European Thought, 2024). In addition, she has translated works by Evald Ilyenkov into English and German, including “Cosmology of the Spirit” (Matthes & Seitz, 2026), and edited Kojève’s unpublished book on the philosophy of physics (Merve Verlag, 2023).