Deborah Goldgaber

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Director Emerita of the LSU Ethics Institute

Jointly Appointed in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

106 Coates Hall

dgoldgaber@lsu.edu

 goldgaver headshot

Professor Goldgaber specializes in contemporary European (especially French) and feminist philosophy.  Her research explores the legacies of structuralism, post-structuralism, and phenomenology in contemporary philosophical debates.


First and foremost a philosopher of embodiment, she has published extensively in areas related to the nature of memory, cultural and biological plasticity, and the effects of technical prosthesis (including language) on embodiment and experience. More recent research extends this line of inquiry and seeks to capture the nature and dynamics of technological “deskilling.”


Goldgaber is also working on a second monograph, The Power to Punish, inspired by Foucault’s work on penal power and the struggles to address mass carceral punishment here in Louisiana and around the US.  It asks and attempts to answer the following questions: Is mass carceral punishment politically and morally intolerable? If so, what is a morally serious and adequate response?


Professor Goldgaber has previously served as Section Head of Philosophy (2020–2026) and was founding Director of the LSU Ethics Institute (2019–2026), where she piloted initiatives on data ethics, ethical AI, the ethics of memorialization and carceral studies among others. As the recipient of grants from the NSF, USDA, and the Louisiana Board of Regents, she has worked with LSU faculty to expand moral literacy across STEM fields by promoting innovative partnerships with the humanities.

B.A. in Economics and Political Science, Vanderbilt University (2000)

M.A. in Philosophy, The New School for Social Research (2005)

Ph.D. in Philosophy, Northwestern University (2014)

PHIL 3001: Existentialism

PHIL 3020: Foundations of Critical Theory

PHIL 4003: Contemporary French Philosophy

PHIL 4936: 19th-Century European Philosophy

PHIL 4945: Problems in Political Philosophy: Punishment

PHIL 7903: Graduate Seminar in History of Philosophy: Frankfurt School

PHIL 7905: Graduate Seminar in Continental Philosophy

HNRS 3025: AI & the Future of the Human

WGG/PHIL 4500: Race, Sex, Science

WGS/PHIL 7150: Graduate Seminar in Feminist Philosophy

Provost’s Research & Creative Activity Support Fund (2024)

Provost’s Seminar & Collaborator Support Fund (2024)

Working Group Fellow, The Center for Collaborative Knowledge, (2023–2024)

SEC Travel Fellowship, (2023)

Louisiana Board of Regents, Departmental Enhancement Grant (2021–2023)

Manship Summer Research Fellowship (2021)

Fellow, Moral Theory Project, LSU Ethics Institute (2018)

ATLAS Grant, Louisiana Board of Regents (2017)

Council on Research, Summer Research Stipend (2017)

 

LSU Ethics Institute grant activity:

Co-PI, NSF FDT-Biotech, From First Principles to Predictive Digital Twins: A Stochastic Microdosimetric Model for Targeted Alpha Therapy–PARP Inhibitor Synergy” ($717.5K) (2027–2030, pending)

Co-PI, USDA-NIFA, Adapting to Digitalization: Labor Market Access and Workforce Development in Tech-driven Agricultural Systems ($600K) (2026–2028)

PI, LSU Institute for Energy Innovation, Just Energy Transitions and Community Benefit Planning ($115K) (2025–2026)

Senior Personnel, NSF-ADVANCE: Organizational Change for Gender Equity in STEM Academic Professions ($3M awarded, grant suspended)

Co-PI, NSF POSE II (Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems II-NSF), ($1.5M) (2024–2027)

Co-PI, “Working Group: AI, Ethics and Automation,” The Center for Collaborative Knowledge, ($5K) (2023–2024)

Co-PI, National Academy of Science (NAS), Gulf Scholars Program ($450K) (2021–2026)

PI, “Embedding Ethics in STEM” Louisiana Board of Regents, Enhancement Grant ($104K) (2021–2023)

Senior Personnel, POSE I (Pathway to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems-NSF) ($300K) (2022–2023)

Books

Speculative Grammatology:  Deconstruction and The New Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

 

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Chapters

“Missing the Mark: Aestheticization, Structure Neglect, and ‘Dark Phenomenology,’” ed.  Vicente Muñoz-Reja and Zachary J. Joachim, Phenomenology, Ontology, Metaphysics, Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology 28 (Brill, 2025)

"'More Space Than Time’: Amodality, ‘Dark Phenomenology’ and Speculative Realism," in After Speculative Realism, ed. Hilan Bensusan (Bloomsbury, 2025)

"Analogies or Ontologies? On the ‘Unreasonable Effectiveness’ of ‘Code’ in the History of the Life Sciences,” The Oxford Literary Review 45 (2024): 186–207

"On Recovering the Past: Textual 'Reversibility' in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!," CR: The New Centennial Review 21 (2021): 207–35

"Matter and Indifference: Realism and Anti-Realism in Feminist Accounts of the Body,’ in Idealism, Relativism, Realism. New Essays on Objectivity Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide, ed. Dominik Finkelde and Paul M. Livingston (Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), 1:193–214

"'Morphogenesis' in New Materialist Thought," Philosophy Today 63 (2019): 999–1012

"Plasticity, Technicity, Writing," Parallax 25 (2019): 137–54

"Return to the Repressive: Re-thinking Nature- Culture in Contemporary Feminist Theory," Open Philosophy 1 (2018): 245–55

“Derrida and Translation,” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, ed. J Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2018), 141–56

"The Plasticity of Writing": Malabou and the Limits of Grammatology," in Thinking Catherine Malabou: Passionate Detachments, ed. Thomas Wormald and Isabell Dahms (London: Roman & Littlefield, 2018), 39–56

"Programmed to Fail? On the Limits of Inscription and the Generality of Writing," Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31 (2017): 444–57 

 

Translations

Matteo Montevil and Bernard Stiegler, “Interview on Entropy, the Living, and Technics” (“Entretien sur l’entropie, le vivant et la technique”), Philosophy Today, Winter 2025

 

Book Reviews and Essays

Review of ilan Bensusan, Memory Assemblages, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 22 (2026): 85–92

Review Essay, "Francisco Vitale’s Biodeconstruction," Derrida Today 13 (2020): 114–21

Review Essay, "Derrida’s The Death Penalty Vol. II.," Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2017)

 

Ethics Institute Collaborations

(with Maria Bampasidou, Thanos Gentimis, Anurag Mandalika) “'Overcoming ‘Digital Divides’: Leveraging higher education to develop next generation digital agriculture professionals," in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 224 (2024)

(with Anurag Mandalika)  “Ethics of AI and Automation in Digital Agriculture,” Choices: Journal of the Agriculture and Applied Economics Association (2024)