Donatella Di Cesare

(Rome, 1956) Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the La Sapienza University of Rome, Donatella Di Cesare was a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer and a researcher at the Centre for Jewish Studies of Heidelberg, after which she has been guest professor at several universities in Germany and the United States. Apart from her substantial body of work in hermeneutics, Di Cesare is well known for her Holocaust research as a result of which she has published several books, notable amongst them Se Auschwitz è nulla. Contro il negazionismo (Il melangolo, 2012) and, in Spanish, Heidegger y los judíos (Heidegger and the Jews, Gedisa, 2017). The latter work is an analysis of Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks (2014), which reignited the wide-ranging, heated controversy over the relationship between his philosophical project and the roots of his anti-Semitism.

Di Cesare has also written about questions pertaining to globalisation and the present-day world, for example with the book published in Spanish as Terrorismo. Una guerra civil global (Terrorism: A Global Civil War, Gedisa, 2017). She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik, and is also on the executive boards of Philosophisches Jahrbuch and Wittgenstein Studien. She is a regular columnist for Corriere della sera and writes in other media outlets. A member of the scientific committee of the Shoah Museum in Rome, she was awarded the “Jewish Culture” Prize of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities in 2015.