Staff profile

I studied Music at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, before completing an MA in Critical Methodologies at KCL and a DPhil in contemporary French thought at Oxford. I also spent a year teaching at the ENS de Lyon and a further three years in Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College before coming to Durham in 2018/19.

Research Interests

My research focuses broadly on the relationship between contemporary French thought and ecological/environmental, social, cultural and political concerns. My first book, Music, Philosophy and Gender in Contemporary French Thought: Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, 2020) explores the way music has been used, understood, or characterised in recent French thought.

I have a special interest in the following areas:

• Twentieth- and twenty-first-century French thought, with a particular focus on its characterisation, use and understanding of music
• Interdisciplinary and intermedial exchanges (for example, the use of musical and/or musicological concepts in philosophy or the representation of music in visual arts)
• Organs (bodily, technological/prosthetic/instrumental, and forms of social organisation) in recent French thought
• Feminist and queer thought

Authored book

• Music, Philosophy and Gender in Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou
  Hickmott, S. (2020). Music, Philosophy and Gender in Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou. Edinburgh University Press

Book review

• Musique et philosophie au XXe siècle: entendre et faire entendre
  Hickmott, S. (2016). Musique et philosophie au XXe siècle: entendre et faire entendre. French Studies, 70(2), 284-285. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knw062

Chapter in book

• On Themes and Variations: Music and Literature in Poststructuralism
  Hickmott, S. (2022). On Themes and Variations: Music and Literature in Poststructuralism. In R. Durkin (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature. Routledge

Conference Paper

• Beyond Lacoue-Labarthe’s Alma Mater: Mus(e)ic, Myth and Modernity, paper given at Modernité du mythe, à partir de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Trinity College, Dublin
  Hickmott, S. (2017, May). Beyond Lacoue-Labarthe’s Alma Mater: Mus(e)ic, Myth and Modernity, paper given at Modernité du mythe, à partir de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Trinity College, Dublin. Presented at Modernité du mythe, à partir de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Trinity College, Dublin
• Sounding the Siren, Sexing the Shipwreck, paper given at Shipwrecks and How to Avoid Them: Seafaring and Writing in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Somerville College, Oxford
  Hickmott, S. (2017, December). Sounding the Siren, Sexing the Shipwreck, paper given at Shipwrecks and How to Avoid Them: Seafaring and Writing in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Somerville College, Oxford. Presented at Shipwrecks and How to Avoid Them: Seafaring and Writing in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Somerville College, Oxford

Journal Article

• Beyond Lacoue-Labarthe’s Alma Mater : mus(e)ic, myth and modernity
  Hickmott, S. (2017). Beyond Lacoue-Labarthe’s Alma Mater : mus(e)ic, myth and modernity. Esprit Créateur, 57(4), 174-188. https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2017.0047
• (En) Corps Sonore: Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Sonotropism”
  Hickmott, S. (2015). (En) Corps Sonore: Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Sonotropism”. French Studies, 69(4), 479-493. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knv152