Isabel Jacobs, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic

Visiting fellowship 2025/2026 (April 1, 2026 – May 4, 2026)

Isabel Jacobs is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, where she researches the reception of Goethe’s morphology across the sciences and humanities in socialist Eastern Europe. In 2025–26, she is a Social Relevance of the Humanities Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Queen Mary University of London and an MA in Russian and East European Literature and Culture from University College London. Her work explores the intersection of philosophy, visual culture, and the history of science. She has published widely, with a focus on Alexandre Kojève and Soviet philosophy. Her co-edited volume Authority, History, and Political Theology is forthcoming with Bloomsbury. She is also a film critic, regularly reporting from international festivals.

Statement of interest

During the fellowship period, she will work on a research project, tentatively entitled Morphological Materialism: Organic Form and Plant Thinking in East Central Europe (1917–1968), which explores how Goethean morphology influenced discourses on organicism, plant life, and the philosophy of biology under state socialism. By uncovering a neglected strand of morphological thinking—diverging from both Soviet dialectical materialism and “Western” structuralism—the project offers an alternative genealogy of twentieth-century ecology. In Ljubljana, she will explore contributions to those debates from across former Yugoslavia, while forging new and strengthening existing collaborations at the Institute, in particular within the research group on Economic and Environmental History.

Selected publications

• Morphological Materialism: A Time-Lapse of Soviet Plant Philosophy, London: CRMEP Publications, edited by Stella Sandford, pp. 23–48.
• Self-Branching Multitude: Hedwig Conrad-Martius as Plant Philosopher, Harvard Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative  (3 April 2025).
• Solar Sacrifice: Bataille and Poplavsky on Friendship, Journal for Cultural Research 29:1–2 (2025), pp. 204–219.
• Thinking in Circles: Kojève and Russian Hegelianism, Studies in East European Thought, Vol. 76:1 (2024), pp. 41–58.
• Evald Ilyenkov’s Ecology of Personality, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog (November 2023).