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

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

Book review

• Hickmott, Sarah (2016). Musique et philosophie au XXe siècle: entendre et faire entendre. French Studies (2): 284-285.

Chapter in book

• Hickmott, Sarah (2021). On Themes and Variations: Music and Literature in Poststructuralism. In The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature. Durkin, Rachael Routledge.

Conference Paper

• Hickmott, Sarah (2017), 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, Shipwrecks and How to Avoid Them: Seafaring and Writing in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Somerville College, Oxford.
• Hickmott, Sarah (2017), 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, Modernité du mythe, à partir de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Trinity College, Dublin.

Journal Article

• Hickmott, Sarah (2017). Beyond Lacoue-Labarthe’s Alma Mater mus(e)ic, myth and modernity. L'Esprit Créateur 57(4): 174-188.
• Hickmott, Sarah (2015). (En) Corps Sonore: Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Sonotropism”. French Studies 69(4): 479-493.