Paola Marrati is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. She holds a joint appointment in the William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy and is affiliated to the Department of Anthropology. From 2007-2011 she was director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 2003, she held the Chair of Philosophy of Art and Culture in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and was director of the research program “Concepts of Life in Contemporary French Philosophy: Genealogies and Transformations” at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She is currently member of the Scientific Board of the Center for the Study of French Contemporary Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris.

Paola Marrati received her education in philosophy in Italy and France: she majored in philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Pisa and pursued her doctoral studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris as well as at the Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg.

Her research interests in modern and contemporary philosophy focus mainly on the works of authors such as Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida and Cavell who all, in spite of their obvious differences, attempt to transform philosophy so that it can continue to be faithful to its ancient task of being at once a criticism of culture and a therapeutic of the self. She is also interested in how philosophical problems are expressed and renewed outside of the canon, especially in literature, films, and TV series. Her teaching reflects her research interests and is guided by the commitment to the most historically accurate and conceptually rigorous reading of texts. Some of her recent courses and seminars include: “Emerson, Baldwin, Cavell and the Unfinished Promise of America: Then and Now,” “Gilles Deleuze. Critical Philosophy,” “The Event and the Ordinary,” “The Morality and Politics of Skepticism,” “Cinema and Philosophy,” “Who or What Counts as Human,” “Concepts of Life.”

Her principal publications include: Understanding Cavell Modernism Modernism ed. (Bloomsbury Press, 2025): Cavell and Value Theory (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2026); “La philosophie et la connaissance ordinaire,” in Concepts de l’ordinaire, P. Fasula ed. (Editions de la Sorbonne, 2021; “Cavell et la promesse démocratique du cinéma,” in Stanley Cavell et la pensée du cinéma, E. Domenach ed. (Editions de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, 2021; Gilles Deleuze. Cinema and Philosophy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Genesis and Trace. Derrida Reader of Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford University Press, 2005). She is currently completing a manuscript entitled The Event and the Ordinary: On the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell.