Ricoeur and Foucault – two calls for papers
Some students and Faculty of our PhD program are launching two call for papers on Ricœur (dedline 20 September 2026) and Foucault (dedline 30 September 2026).
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2026 Lyon Annual Seminar (UCLy) – Person and Common Good
The 2026 Annual Seminar took place on 7-10 September in Lyon, hosted by the Catholic University of Lyon (UCLy), under the umbrella title “Person and Common Good. How can Social Catholicism Renew Contemporary Humanism?”.
Contemporary humanism is confronted today with epochal challenges: globalization, social fragmentation, ecological crisis, and technological transformations that affect our very understanding of the human person. In this context, the Catholic Church’s social doctrine constitutes a highly relevant theoretical and practical resource, grounded in the centrality of human dignity and the principle of the common good. The contributions of the Lyon school of social Catholicism—particularly the thought of Joseph Vialatoux and Jean Lacroix—provide valuable tools for rethinking the relationship between the individual and the community, emphasizing cooperation as an alternative to the logic of domination. Their reflections on social democracy and collective responsibility prove especially fruitful for addressing the tensions between individual freedom and social justice, which are today exacerbated by global economic and technological dynamics. The seminar aims to examine the possibility of an integral humanism capable of combining historical rootedness with innovative openness, in order to respond to contemporary challenges: ecological transition, social inclusion, and the ethical regulation of technology. What categories and practices might emerge from this dialogue between tradition and modernity?
Download here the program.
Lethal Intersections: Rethinking Humanism Beyond the Matrix of Domination (Patricia Hill Collins)
On April 22, 2026, Patricia Hill Collins, Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, delivered a lecture for the PhD program in Contemporary Humanism, focusing on the category of intersectionality and its productivity in rethinking and updating the concept of humanism. The lecture by Professor Hill Collins was preceded by an introductory talk by Professor Mariella Nocenzi on the category of intersectionality.
Click to watch Professor Hill Collins’ lecture
Click to watch Professor Mariella Nocenzi’s introductory talk (in Italian)
Who’s afraid of error (Brunella Antomarini)
“On January 14, 2026, Professor Brunella Antomarini of John Cabot University delivered a seminar entitled ‘Who’s Afraid of Error?’.”
Click on the image to watch the video.
“The Paradoxes of Gift – 100 years after Marcel Mauss’ Essai sur le don (1925)” – International Conference
The conference, which took place on November 11, 2025, focused the legacy of Marcel Mauss and his Essai of 1925. Starting from the observation of the paradoxical character of the gift as both free and compulsory in some archaic societies, Mauss proposed an interpretation of social relations that profoundly affected not only the social sciences, but also philosophy and theology, producing a true paradigm shift and a flourishing season of studies, of which it is now time to take stock. The conference focused on the phenomenon of gift and the most important categories associated with it: duty, gratuitousness, reciprocity, symbol, supererogation.
Keynote speakers:
Jean-Luc Marion, Académie française, PhD program “Contemporary Humanism”
Cyril O’Regan. University of Notre Dame
Consuelo Corradi, LUMSA University, PhD program “Contemporary Humanism”
Chair:
Stefano Biancu
LUMSA University, PhD program “Contemporary Humanism”
University of Notre Dame Rome Associate Fellow
2025 Rome Annual Seminar (LUMSA) – Humanism of Hope
Download here the poster, the detailed program and the abstracts of lectures and presentations. Here the seminar’s proceedings (open access).
Greetings
Francesco Bonini, Rector of LUMSA University (Italy) (video)
Caterina Fiorilli, Head of Human Studies Department of LUMSA University (Italy) (video)
Introduction
Stefano Biancu, Coordinator of the PhD program “Contemporary Humanism”, LUMSA University (Italy) (video)
Keynote lectures (click on the title to watch the video)
Bishop Paul Tighe, Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education (Vatican City State), Humanism of Hope in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Emmanuel Falque, Institut Catholique de Paris (France), Survival and Creation
Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University (Australia), What Can the Humanist Hope for?
Fernando Arancibia Collao, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile), Common Good and Social Welfare
Zaida Borges Charepe, Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Portugual), Hope and Integral Health: Nurturing a Human-Centered Approach
Chiara Pesaresi, Unversité Catholique de Lyon (France), Hors d’attente. Rethinking Hope with Henri Maldiney
PhD Students’ Presentations (click on the title to watch the video)
- Enrico di Meo, LUMSA-ICP: Imaginative Variation on Power: Ricœur’s Take on Utopia
- Gianluca Michelli, LUMSA: The Non-Person. Benveniste and Ortigues on the Role of the Third Person
- Tomaso Pignocchi, LUMSA-ICP: Language and Emptiness. Toward a Non-Foundational Soteriological Epistemology
- Orlando Garcia, ICP-LUMSA: Hope and the Total Value of Human Existence
- Jan Juhani Steinmann, ICP-LUMSA: Disquiet, Freedom and Hope. On the Dialectics of Possibility and Impossibility
- Sarah Horton, ICP-ACU: Maine de Biran on the Limits of Science and the Self
- Carlo Maria Simone, UCP-LUMSA: Hope Beyond the Apocalypse: An Ovidian Myth in the Road by Cormac McCarthy
- Alessia Cadelo, LUMSA-UCP: The Multidimensional Concept of Autonomy and Hope
- François Deshors, UCLy-LUMSA: Postmodernity and Disenchantment: Hope Confronted with the Illusion of Omniscience
with the Development of Artificial Intelligence - Jèrèmie Supiot, UCLy-LUMSA: What is Constructivism?
- Costanza Vizzani, LUMSA-PUC: Surrogacy in the Feminist Debate
- Cecilia Benassi, LUMSA: Pavel Florensky and Hope between Poetry and Apocalypse
- Flavia Chieffi, LUMSA-UCLy: Hope as a Figure of Human Historicity: Time and History in Virgilio Melchiorre’s Philosophy
- Giuseppe Vena, LUMSA: Some Notes for a Genealogy of Confession: Foucault and the Christian Alethurgy
- Lorenza Zucchi, UCLy-LUMSA: Invisibility and Passibility of Aesthetic Experience: Perspectives from Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney
- Giammarco Basile, LUMSA-PUC: Flaminio Piccoli, the DC and the South America
- Francesco Marcelli, LUMSA: Hope and Optimism among Italian Catholic University Students during the Post-War Period
- Matteo Mostarda, LUMSA: Enrico Mattei’s Approach to International Relations
- Riccardo Maria Sciarra, LUMSA: The Long Road to the EPP: A Historical Analysis of Christian Democratic Cooperation in Europe
- Victoria Bauer, LUMSA-UCLy: Hope in Philosophical Posthumanism
- Federico Rudari, UCP-LUMSA: Disorientation and Movement in Anne Imhof’s Natures Mortes
- Marco Valerio, LUMSA-UCP: Challenges in Integrating Civic and Citizenship Education and Education for Sustainable Development in Initial Teacher Education for Pre-Primary and Primary Education: Preliminary Findings from Two Italian Case Studies
- Giacomo Chironi, PhD, LUMSA: Between Forgiveness and Hope
Cyril O’Regan, The Drama of Christian Humanism
On 21 November 2024, Cyril O’Regan, professor of Theology a the University of Notre Dame (USA) and the 2024 recipient of the prestigious Ratzinger Prize, has given the 2024/2025 Opening Lecture of the PhD Program “Contemporary Humanism”, entitled “The Drama of Christian Humanism“.
Download the Flyer.
Meeting with the post-doctoral programme in Integral Human Development (DHI)
On Wendsday 28 February 2024, a joint-meeting of the doctoral programme in Contemporay Humanism and the post-doctoral programme in Integral Human Development (DHI) took place at LUMSA University in Rome.
Led by professor Peter Hanenberg and professor Stefano Biancu, about thirty fellows of the two programmes gathered togheter to share insights and friendship along with some Faculty from the involved institutions (LUMSA University, Catholic University of Portugal). A representative of Porticus Foundation, Cristina Robledano, took also part at the meeting.
As interdisciplinary research environments, and moving from the ideas of humanism and human development, the two programmes share a common focus on the urgent question, what does it mean to be human?
Angry Men and the Rise od Populism (Bryan S. Turner)
On 1 February 2024, Professor Bryan S. Turner (Australian Catholic University) gave a lecture entitled, “Angry Men and the Rise of Populism”.
The event was chaired by Professor Stefano Biancu, coordinator of the PhD program “Contemporary Humanism”. The topic and Prof. Turner’s talk were introduced by Consuelo Corradi, Professor of General Sociology at LUMSA University.
Bryan S. Turner is a world-renowned British – Australian sociologist, currently professor at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University (Australia).
