Smaranda earned her Ph.D. at Emory University. She has held research appointments as
Postdoctoral Mellon Fellow in Philosophy at Dartmouth College, Leslie Center for the Humanities (2012-2014),
Fulbright Finland Research Scholar (2019-2020), and
Kone Foundation Finland Senior Research Scholar (2019-2021) for her project
Transcendental Phenomenology as Critique – Limits, Possibilities, and Beyond as well as Visiting Researcher positions with the MEPA (Marginalization and Experience: Phenomenological Analyses of Normality and Abnormality) Academy of Finland project (2019-2021), the Husserl Archives in Leuven and Cologne, the Center for Subjectivity Research at University of Copenhagen, and University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Her research interests include phenomenology (especially issues surrounding phenomenological methods, possibility constitution, experiences of difference, political phenomenology as well as distinctive forms of consciousness such as imagination, perception, memory, and expectation), critical philosophy, feminist philosophy, and phenomenological psychopathology (focusing specifically on anomalous forms of imagination in schizophrenia spectrum disorders). She is the co-editor of a special issue of
Continental Philosophy Review, co-edited with Amy Allen, entitled "The Historical A Priori in Husserl and Foucault" and a special issue of
Husserl Studies, co-edited with Julia Jansen, entitled
"Imagination in Husserlian Phenomenology: Variations and Modalities." Her collected essays volume,
Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters (co-edited with David Carr and Sara Heinämaa), came out with Routledge in 2022. She is currently working on a collected essays volume on political phenomenology and emancipatory politics (with Delia Popa, Villanova University), which will be the inaugural volume for the new Springer book series she is launching, together with Delia Popa and Christian Ferencz-Flatz (University of Bucharest/Romanian Society for Phenomenology), entitled
New Directions in Phenomenology. Stay tuned for exciting updates on this front as well as updates for the upcoming launching of the
Transatlantic Phenomenology Research Seminar, which Smaranda will be co-hosting Fall 2023 and onward, together with Sara Heinämaa (University of Jyväskylä)! The Seminar will meet regularly (online) to support work-in-progress by junior and senior scholars alike.
Smaranda is currently working on two monographs: a project that offers, drawing on rich phenomenological resources, multifaceted analyses of the imagination in order to explicate its role in experiencing difference and the otherwise. The project seeks to make available powerful critical tools for studying oppressive, exclusionary, and marginalizing practices in registers such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The book also contends that social critique in all forms depends on the imagination and that phenomenology offers exceptional resources for studying the imagination.
Building on her extensive research on phenomenological methods, Smaranda is also working on a book project that interprets the methodology of transcendental phenomenology as radical-immanent critique – a critique able to uncover the necessary structures of meaning constitution through analyses of the normalized, sedimented, and discursive layers of experience. To make this case, she performs a rigorous examination of phenomenological methods, including, innovatively, their historical and normative dimensions, and argues that phenomenology can offer resources that are critical in distinctive ways precisely in virtue of its methods' commitments.
Her work on topics such as
mental images,
imagination and the otherwise,
abstraction,
the structure of consciousness,
the methodological import of possibility-constitution,
self-variation and self-constitution,
transcendental eidetics,
teleology and historical reflection,
normativity,
critical reflection,
phenomenology as radical immanent critique, and
feminist phenomenology has appeared in journals such as
Husserl Studies,
Continental Philosophy Review,
The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Research,
Idealistic Studies, the
Hegel Bulletin, and
Axiomathes as well as in various collected essay volumes, such as
EdmundHusserl's Cartesian Meditations– Commentary, Interpretations, Discussions (edited by Daniele de Santis, Alber, 2023),
Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters (co-edited with David Carr and Sara Heinämaa),
Norms,
Values, Goals (edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Ilpo Hirvonen, Routledge 2022), and
Critique in German Philosophy (edited by Colin McQuillan and María del Rosario Acosta, SUNY Press, 2020).
She is a member of the
Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the
Husserl Circle (for which she was the convenor of the
Annual Meeting of the Husserl Circle in 2014 at Dartmouth College), the
Nordic Society for Phenomenology, and
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Phänomenologische Forschung and an active referee for over a dozen academic journals and several academic presses. She also serves as editorial board member of
Continental Philosophy Review,
Phenomenological Investigations, and the
Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought series (Lexington Books at Rowman and Littlefield).
For more information visit Smaranda's
Academia and
PhilPeople websites.
Curriculum Vitae