Associate Professor of Philosophy
vanleeax@jmu.edu
Contact Info
Office: Cleveland Hall 312
Education
B.A. The University of Western Ontario
M.A. Queen’s University
Ph.D. The New School for Social Research
Research
Dr. van Leeuwen’s research is in 19th and 20th century continental philosophy. Drawing on this tradition, her work deals with social and political issues and she is particularly interested in issues related to symbolic and material structures of domination and exploitation.
Teaching
Dr. van Leeuwen teaches courses in ethical reasoning and various topics in continental philosophy, and she leads the departmental Philosophy and Film group. She also has an interest in feminist philosophy, literary theory and aesthetics.
Recent Publications
"'Left-Wing' Thought Today: Simone de Beauvoir on Fetishism and Belief," Journal of Speculative Philosophy 39:3 (2025): 274-283.
"Irigaray: The Politics of Sexual Difference as Anontological Difference" in The Routledge Handbook of Political Phenomenology, edited by Nils Baratella et.al. (Routledge, 2024).
"Simone de Beauvoir and 'Women's Work'," invited contribution to the Blog of the American Philosophical Association: Women in Philosophy, January 25, 2023.
"Useless Mouths: Value, Women's Work, and the Struggle against Exploitation," Simone de Beauvoir Studies 32:2 (2022): 325-344. (*Awarded the Patterson Prize from the journal of Simone de Beauvoir Studies.)
"Deconstruction, Defiguration, Disconcertion: On Reading Speculum de l'autre femme with Derrida and Lacan," Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray: Language, Origin, Art, Love, edited by Gail M. Schwab (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), 257-269.
"Bodies that matter? From embodied subjectivity to materialism in Merleau-Ponty's Political Philosophy," Chiasma 5 (2018), 2-34.
"Merely Analogical: Structuralism and the critique of political economy" in Lacan contra Foucault, edited by Nadia Bou Ali and Rohit Goel (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 109-138.
"And Yet It Moves: Marx, Benjamin, Brecht and the Subject of Modernity," Parallax 24:2 (2018): 176-192.
Differences: Beauvoir and Irigaray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), co-edited with Emily Anne Parker.
"We have always been materialists: Beauvoir, Irigaray and the specter of materialism," in Differences: Beauvoir and Irigaray, edited by Emily Anne Parker and Anne van Leeuwen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 114-133.
"Simone de Beauvoir and the dialectic of desire in L'invitée" in A Companion to Beauvoir, edited by Nancy Bauer and Laura Hengehold (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 356-366.
"Further Speculations: Time and Difference ni Speculum de l'autre femme," in Engaging the World: Thinking After Irigaray, edited by Mary Rawlinson (New York: SUNY Press, 2016), 51-64.
“An examination of Irigaray's commitment to transcendental phenomenology in The Forgetting of Air and The Way of Love,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 28:3 (2013), 452-468.
“Beauvoir, Irigaray and the Possibility of Feminist Phenomenology,” SPEP Supplement, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26.2 (2012), 474-484.
“Sexuate Difference, Ontological Difference: Between Irigaray and Heidegger,” Continental Philosophy Review 43.1 (2010), 111-126.
