Frances Maughan-Brown

Biography

Frances Maughan-Brown is the co-editor of the International Journal of Kierkegaard Research. Her book, The Lily's Tongue: Figure and Authority in Kierkegaard's Lily Discourses (SUNY Press, 2019) is the first to discover the pattern weaving together Kierkegaard's four signed texts on Matthew 6:24-34, to address them as a cycle, and to name them the Lily Discourses. These texts remain central to her reading of Kierkegaard and those influenced by him in the Continental tradition, particularly because of what they have to say about the "call,"  or the "summons," which Heidegger will later put in terms of "conscience," and which Levinas will put in terms of "love" and "justice".

Responding in part to the anti-authoritarian and anti-patriarchal thrust of Kierkegaard's writing, and the way those texts disclose the intertwining of the political and the aesthetic, Frances Maughan-Brown is working more and more with Feminist texts, as well as with the question of "community."

She has been teaching philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross since 2017. 

Editorial Positions

Co-Editor of The International Journal for Kierkegaard Research 

Publications

Books

The Lily’s Tongue: Figure and Authority in Kierkegaard’s Lily Discourses. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. 

Essays

“The Secrecy of Possibility in Kierkegaard’s ‘Pattern,’” in Kierkegaard and Possibility, ed. Erin Plunkett, Bloomsbury Press, 2023 (78-98).

“Kissing the Image: an Allegory of Imagination in ‘The Seducer’s Diary’” in History of European Ideas, Routledge, 2021, 47 (3): 528-542.

“Without Authority: Kierkegaard’s Resistance to Patriarchy,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook. New York: de Gruyter, 2021, 26 (1): 301-323.

“Imagination,” in Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Volume 15, Tome III, of Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources Series, ed. Steven Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Burlington: Ashgate, 2014 (195-202).

“Metaphor,” in Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Volume 15, Tome IV, of Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources Series, ed. Steven Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Burlington: Ashgate, 2014 (216-225).

“Amor: God of Love – Psyche’s Seducer,” in Kierkegaard’s Literary Figures and Motifs, Volume 16, Tome I, ed. Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2014 (41-49).

“Job’s Suffering,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2011 (365-383).