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

Isabel Jacobs (PhD, Queen Mary University of London) is a writer and scholar of philosophy based in London and Prague. She is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her work explores the intersection of philosophy, visual culture, and the history of science, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the role of exile and the migration of ideas. She has published and lectured widely across Europe, the United States, and China, and is actively involved in several research groups. She co-founded the international network Soviet Temporalities, which examines conceptions of time in Soviet culture and thought. She is also an Affiliated Member of the Aleksanteri Research Group for Intellectual History at the University of Helsinki. She is currently writing a monograph on Alexandre Kojève and aesthetics, while her recent work explores plant life in Russian and continental philosophy. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volumes Alexandre Kojève and Gaston Fessard: Authority, History, and Political Theology, Plant Philosophy: Critique of Vegetal Reason, and Who Thinks Concretely? Essays on Evald Ilyenkov. In addition, she has translated works by Ilyenkov into English and German, including Cosmology of the Spirit (Matthes & Seitz, 2026), and edited Kojève’s first book on the philosophy of physics (Merve Verlag, 2023).