Conversation with Dr Komarine Romdenh-Romluc
Friday 13 March 2026, 1pm - 2pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All Welcome
Dr. Frantz Omar Fanon was one of, if not the most important anticolonial thinkers of the twentieth century. Born under French colonial rule, on the Caribbean island of Martinique, Fanon trained as a psychiatrist in France, before becoming involved in the liberation struggle in North Africa. Even in these latter years, Fanon continued to practise psychiatry As has been recognised by thinkers including, Hussein Abdilahi Bulan in his 1985 text Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, and more recently, Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce in their 2017 Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry, and Politics, Fanon’s political and psychiatric thinking are deeply intertwined. In this session, we will explore some of these continuities, focusing on Fanon’s conception of the human. I will suggest that he draws in part on phenomenology’s understandings of intersubjectivity – what it is to live as one of many selves who share a common world – to draw the contours of what it is to be psychically healthy. Spelling this out will allow us to reach a deeper understanding of Fanon’s contention that colonial society is itself sick.
Biography:
Dr Komarine Romdenh-Romluc is a British-Khmer academic and sound artist, whose current work uses phenomenological philosophy and sound to explore questions of diaspora identity and its fractured relationship with a homeland. She is writing a book about the philosophy of Frantz Fanon, which was supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship in 2021 – 2023, and will be published in early 2027. She is also working on an AHRC-funded project with photographer Charles Fox, which uses phenomenology and photography to investigate Cambodian post-genocide experiences. A large part of Komarine’s previous work focused on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, and she is the author of the Routledge GuideBook to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. She works as a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sheffield.
