Kurt C. M. Mertel

I am currently Associate Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of the Minor Program in Philosophy at the American University of Sharjah. I am the founding editor of Insubordination (s), a new book series with De Gruyter-Brill, and founder and PI of the Research Group in Aesthetics, Ethics, and Society (RAES). My research lies at the intersection of Aesthetics, Ethics, and Social and Political Philosophy, which I approach from the perspective of Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Critical Social Theory. As part of my project 'Globalizing Critical Theory' supported by a Research Partnership Grant from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), I was a Visiting Scholar at the University of St. Gallen (August 2023 & 2024). In the Fall 2025, I was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and in May 2026, I will be a Research Fellow affiliated with the CoRe Project at the Czech Academy of the Sciences.