Samuel Underwood

I earned a B.A. in English and philosophy from Midwestern State University and an M.A. in philosophy from Gonzaga University. My master's thesis drew principally upon Richard Kearney's anatheism and Jean-Louis Chrétien's phenomenology of art to explore the work of a number of Romantic, modernist, and contemporary poets, including William Blake, the Imagists, and Galway Kinnell.

My current interests continue to revolve primarily around aesthetics, imagination, narrative, and poetry, engaging sources in hermeneutic phenomenology (i.e., Ricoeur, Gadamer, and Kearney) and thinkers associated with the "theological turn" in recent French phenomenology (i.e., Chrétien, Henry, and Marion). I am especially interested in tracking issues related to poetic language and imagination—e.g., metaphor, mimesis and reference, silence, etc.—as well as questions regarding interpretation and narrative theory.