Keynote speakers announced for ‘Michel Serres: Music, Noise, Waves, Rhythm’ symposium
12-13 November 2026
The keynote speakers represent a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives, reflecting the conference’s interdisciplinary scope.
- Steven Connor is Professor of English at King’s College London and Grace 2 Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Cambridge.
- Elie During is an Associate Professor of philosophy at University Paris Nanterre whose work engages with contemporary thought across disciplines.
- Lucie K. Mercier is an affiliated Researcher in philosophy at the LLCP at Paris 8 and a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective.
- Rick Dolphijn is a writer, teacher and curator whose work moves between philosophy, ecology and the arts. He is associate professor at the university of Utrecht.
Rick Dolphijn
Rick Dolphijn is a writer, teacher, and curator working at the intersection of philosophy, ecology, and the arts. He is associate professor at Utrecht University. His research engages continental philosophy and materialist thought, with a focus on earth, sound, and more-than-human relations. At this conference, he examines Michel Serres’s understanding of music as a material, planetary force grounded in the dynamics of the Earth.
Lucie K. Mercier
Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier has published extensively on Michel Serres’s earliest philosophy, focusing especially on Serres’s ties with structuralism and the French epistemological tradition : « The History of Truth: Serres, Canguilhem, Foucault » (Parrhesia), and « Michel Serres’s Leibnizian Structuralism », (Angelaki). She is currently working on a project on Frantz Fanon’s « dramaturgies ».
Élie During
Élie During is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University Paris Nanterre. He specializes in contemporary French thought (from Bergson to Serres), with a focus on the philosophical and wider cultural implications of the concept of simultaneity at the crossroads of science, metaphysics, and the arts. His publications range from critical editions of Bergson and Bachelard to studies of time and relativity theory, essays on images and retrofuturism, and a work of fiction inspired by Glenn Gould. Forthcoming are L’Image-volume (Éditions MF, autumn 2026), and a meditation on Bach’s Art of Fugue (Vrin, 2027).
Steven Connor
Steven Connor will bring together two of Michel Serres’s recurrent preoccupations through his work: with angels and with music. Angels have performed various different functions in the religious imagination: as messengers, intelligences, comforters, combatants and bureaucratic functionaries. But it seems that they only began to become musical from the late medieval period onwards. He expects to intimate how intersections of angels and music in Michel Serres’s work bring music into concordance with glory, violence, noise, intelligence and terror.
The conference seeks to open a space for dialogue across disciplines, engaging with Serres’ thinking through music, philosophy, and artistic research.
Bringing together these keynote speakers, the conference aims to foster new perspectives on sound, knowledge, and relationality, and to situate Serres’ work within current artistic and theoretical debates.
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The event is organised by Jonathan Impett and Zeynep Toraman