BA in Interdisciplinary Studies

Mario D'Amato completed his PhD at the University of Chicago (2000), where he studied the philosophy of religion, with a special emphasis on Buddhist philosophy. His primary research has been focused on the translation and interpretation of Sanskrit Buddhist doctrinal texts from the Yogācāra school, a school notable for having developed a Buddhist conception of the "unconscious."

D'Amato published a study and annotated translation of the fourth century CE Buddhist treatise Distinguishing the Middle from the Extremes (Columbia, 2012), the co-edited volume Pointing at the Moon: Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy (Oxford, 2009), as well as a number of articles on Buddhist thought in various journals and edited volumes. His continuing research aims to engage Buddhist thought in relation to Hegel, semiotics, and especially psychoanalysis.

Brian Alessandro is a PhD researcher at GCAS College Dublin whose work centres on the intersection of masochism, martyrdom, trauma, and resilience, with neuroplasticity and moral philosophy as connective tissue. He is taking a multidisciplinary approach with his dissertation, integrating ethnographic field work with theory and cultural studies.

He holds a BFA in Media from the New York Institute of Technology and an MA in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University, where he focused on trauma and bereavement.

Alfie Bown is Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is author of several books on psychoanalysis and digital media including The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships (Pluto, 2022) and In the Event of Laughter (Bloomsbury, 2018).

He has also edited many books including Why Are Animals Funny? (Zero, 2014) and Post-Memes (Punctum, 2019). His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The Paris Review, New Statesman, Newsweek, Tribune, The Independent and OpenDemocracy.

Pearl Brock is a Consultant Clinical Psychotherapist, Senior Lecturer, and Clinical Director of Think Well Psychotherapy Clinic in Ireland. She began her professional journey in the Church of Ireland, training toward ordination before redirecting her path to psychotherapy in order to engage with a broader cohort of people.

Her clinical and academic work is grounded in psychodynamic and Jungian approaches, with expertise in Jungian dream analysis. Her research interests focus on complex clinical presentations, including work with offenders and individuals facing acute psychological challenges, alongside a wider concern with the nature of human experience. She is also the founder of Personal Philosophy Focused Psychotherapy (PPFP), a developing therapeutic model that integrates philosophical inquiry with psychotherapeutic practice.

In higher education she lectures on ethics, reflective practice, abnormal psychology, and professional development, and at GCAS she teaches Applied Ethics within the BA programme. She completed her PhD at GCAS in 2025.

Jamie Davies is a philosopher specialising in post-Kantian European thought, including critical theory, visual culture, and literary theory. He completed his PhD, The Unmooring, at GCAS, on the deconstruction of the subject in Heidegger, Derrida, Nancy, and Agamben.

From this, his current research focuses on understanding exhaustion as a mode of thinking being, the subject, and language beyond the paradigm of substance, and on articulating a "useless" form of life that would be ethical in a manner not predicated on duty. At GCAS he primarily teaches at the intersections between philosophy and literature.

Father Alexander Earl serves as a priest at St John of the Ladder Orthodox Church in Greenville, South Carolina, a parish within the Orthodox Church in America. He holds an MDiv from St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary and an MA in Religion and Philosophical Theology from Yale Divinity School.

His academic interests and specialisation include the Eastern patristic tradition, with emphasis on the concept of theophany and the relationship between Christian dogma and Platonic metaphysics. He has appeared in magazines including the Marginalia Review of Books and has published peer-reviewed articles in the International Philosophical Quarterly, Christian Bioethics, and the Journal of Early Christian Studies. He is also a contributor to the forthcoming Into the Light: Orthodox Christianity and Classical Education, from St Vladimir's Seminary Press.

He is co-founder, former director, and current Senior Fellow of the Pacifica Center for Philosophy + Theology in Santa Monica, California.

Francisco González Castro (Santiago, Chile, 1984) is an artist, researcher and writer. He holds a PhD in Arts, major in Visual Arts, from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and is part of both GCAS College Dublin and GCAS Latin America. He has exhibited his artistic work in numerous countries and presented his research in conferences, journals and books.

He is the author of Matar un Rey. Consideraciones para una práctica político-artística (2023), Fuera de lugar. Textos sobre prácticas artísticas, políticas y afectivas (2023) and Puntos en el Borde: crónica de un viaje por la frontera México-Estados Unidos (Almacén Editorial, 2022); editor of Otro lugar. Perspectivas sobre la empatía y sus potencias (Editorial Milhojas, 2022); and co-author of Performance Art en Chile (Metales Pesados, 2016), Mario Pedrosa y el CISAC (Metales Pesados, 2019) and El Arte como Revolución (Metales Pesados, 2022).

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent fifteen years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, serving as Middle East and Balkans bureau chief and reporting from more than fifty countries. He was part of the team awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism, and received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism the same year. He reported earlier for The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, and National Public Radio, covering the conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.

He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, along with American Fascists, Empire of Illusion, Death of the Liberal Class, Wages of Rebellion, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, and America: The Farewell Tour. He holds a BA in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where he also studied ancient Greek and Latin. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto, and has taught college-credit courses in the New Jersey prison system since 2013. He writes and broadcasts The Chris Hedges Report.

Jessi Knippel holds three master's degrees in Religion, one with a focus on gender studies and two with an emphasis in art and pop culture. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation at Claremont Graduate School, where she is examining connections between the English witch trials and African hybrid religion in the American South and Caribbean.

Her research interests include pop culture, religion, gender and sexuality studies, cults, American evangelicalism, and religious deconstruction. She teaches humanities courses at GCAS and lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.

Nicholas Laccetti is a writer and theologian based in New York City. He holds an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary and an MA in Medieval Studies from Fordham University.

His PhD research at GCAS focuses on the theme and theological aesthetics of America in radical death-of-God theology. For the BA programme he teaches courses on the history of reading and on religious studies.

Helen Rollins graduated as top student in Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University, with a double first in modern languages. She was also a boursière étrangère at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon. At twenty-two she taught French language, film and literature at Eton College, leaving that post two years later to work as a filmmaker.

In her cinematic work she explores ideas of desire, repression and loss. She has a particular interest in psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and film and literature from the French and Spanish-speaking world. She has taught at GCAS since 2020.

Filippo Scafi is a PhD candidate in philosophy at GCAS College Dublin and an affiliated researcher at the School of Materialist Research. His work engages the intersections of philosophy, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, with particular emphasis on epistemology, alterity, and the critique of representation.

His dissertation focuses on the philosophical and epistemological limits of the Ontological Turn in anthropology, examining how concepts of difference and alterity function as both pharmakon and impasse, and advancing François Laruelle's non-philosophy as an alternative framework. He has taught introductory philosophy courses at GCAS, with a focus on ancient Greek philosophy, truth and discourse, and the legacy of Socratic critique in relation to writing and democracy.

Valeria Venditti is a philosopher working at the intersection of ethics, identity, and healthcare. Trained at La Sapienza, University of Rome, their research focuses on inclusion in healthcare ethics, particularly for gender-diverse and LGBTQAI+ people.

They are the author of The Law and Politics of Inclusion (Routledge, 2019) and contribute articles and book chapters in ethics and political philosophy. They are also the founder and organiser of TransCare, a biennial conference on trans, gender-diverse, and intersex-inclusive healthcare.