Dr. Marco Cavallaro has been Assistant Professor at the Husserl Archive, University of Cologne, since October 2024, where he leads the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded project Italian Phenomenology. From 2020 to 2024, he was a research associate at the Department of Philosophy at what is now the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU), formerly the University of Koblenz-Landau.
He studied Philosophy at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (BA) and the University of Trento (MA), and Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy at KU Leuven (MPhil). In 2016, he was a Visiting Scholar at Boston College. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cologne in February 2021 with a dissertation on Husserl’s theory of science. The dissertation will be published in 2026 as Wissenschaft als System: Husserls Programm der Wissenschaftslehre in Springer’s Phaenomenologica series. In 2026, he obtained the Italian Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (National Scientific Qualification) for appointment as Associate Professor in Theoretical Philosophy and History of Philosophy.
His co-edited volumes include The Existential Husserl: A Collection of Critical Essays (with George Heffernan, Springer, 2022), Phenomenologies in the Digital Age: The Fictional, the Virtual, the Magical (with Nicolas de Warren, Routledge, 2025), and the forthcoming The Philosophy of Enzo Paci: Phenomenology, Materialism, and Critique (with Délia Popa, Routledge). He is also editing the handbook Italienische Phänomenologie (Metzler).
From 2020 to 2022, he served as an editor of the journal Phänomenologische Forschungen. He is also a co-founder of et al. – Ein Blog für phänomenologische Philosophie, a platform for discussion and exchange in phenomenological research.
His research focuses on Edmund Husserl’s philosophy, Italian phenomenology, and the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism. In his habilitation project, he is developing a materialist phenomenology that takes bodily needs and the social conditions of their satisfaction as its starting point. He investigates how material dependence and the experience of lack shape our relations to ourselves, to others, and to the world, and explores the implications for a phenomenological critique of society. His further areas of interest include philosophical anthropology, particularly questions of embodiment, habit, and displacement, as well as the phenomenology of digital experience.
