Souleymane Bachir Diagne received his academic training in France. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure (ULM), Dr. Diagne holds an agrégation in philosophy (1978) and he took his Doctorat d’État in philosophy at the Sorbonne (1988) where he also took his BA (1977). Before joining Columbia University in 2008 he taught philosophy for many years at Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar (Senegal) and at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL). His field of research includes history of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature. 

Dr. Diagne is the author of many influential books spanning the history of philosophy, contemporary Global and African Philosophy including: African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull Books, 2011); The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (Dakar, Codesria, 2016); Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition (New York, Columbia University Press, 2018) and En quête d'Afrique(s) : universalisme et pensée décoloniale, cowritten with Jean-Loup Amselle (2018). His book, Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2011), was published as Postcolonial Bergson by Fordham University Press (2019). It was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret Prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 2011. In that same year, Professor Diagne received The Édouard Glissant Prize for his work.  His most recent book, De langue à langue, l’hospitalité de la traduction with Albin Michel (2022) presents translation as humanism. 

François Raffoul is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Heidegger and the Subject (Prometheus Books, 1999), A Chaque fois Mien (Galilée, Paris, 2004), The Origins of Responsibility (Indiana University Press, 2010) and Thinking the Event (Indiana University Press, 2020).  He is the co-editor of several volumes, Disseminating Lacan (1996), Heidegger and Practical Philosophy (2002), Rethinking Facticity (2008), French Interpretations of Heidegger (2008), and The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger (Bloomsbury, 2013, 2016). He has co-translated several French philosophers including, Dominique Janicaud’s Heidegger in France (Indiana U. Press, 2015), Jacques Derrida (“Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce”, in Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, SUNY Press, 2013), and Jean-Luc Nancy (The Title of the Letter: a Reading of Lacan (1992), The Gravity of Thought (1998), The Creation of the World or Globalization (2007) and Identity (2014). He co-directs the book series Contemporary French Thought for SUNY Press.

Ancien élève of the École Normale Supérieure of St Cloud/Fontenay, agrégé de philosophie, Dr. Raffoul holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Jacques Derrida, advisor). Before joining the Philosophy faculty at LSU in 2000, he taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1988 to 1996. Dr. Raffoul specializes in contemporary continental philosophy and his research has focused on continental theories of subjectivity, in particular its ethical dimension, exploring the question of responsibility in contemporary continental thought. His reflection on ethics has paid special attention to the phenomenological concept of facticity. He is now pursuing research on the question of the event in contemporary thought. 

Claire Colebrook is the author of New Literary Histories (Manchester UP, 1997) and Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum 1997).  She co-authored Theory and the Disappearing Future with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller (Routledge 2011) and co-edited Deleuze and Feminist Theory with Ian Buchanan (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), Deleuze and History with Jeff Bell (Edinburgh 2008), Deleuze and Gender with Jami Weinstein (Edinburgh UP 2009).  She is the co-editor, with Tom Cohen, of a series of monographs for Open Humanities Press: Critical Climate Change. She has written articles on visual culture, poetry, literary theory, queer theory, and contemporary culture. Her most recent book is Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (Nebraska UP, 2023). She is now completing a book on fragility (of the species, the archive and the earth).

Daniel W. Smith received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and works primarily in Continental philosophy. He is the author of Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh 2012) and the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (2012, with Henry Somers Hall). He has translated, from the French, books by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Klossowski, Isabelle Stengers, and Michel Serres. He is the co-director of “The Deleuze Seminars” project (deleuze.cla.purdue.edu), which is translating Deleuze’s seminar lectures and is supported by grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities. He is currently working on a book entitled Technicity and Thought. In his free time, he enjoys not working.