Anya Topolski is an associate professor in ethics and political philosophy at the Radboud University Nijmegen. She obtained two bachelor degrees at McGill University in Montreal, Canada: BSc in Biochemistry (1999) and an BA Honours in Philosophy (2000). After a brief but memorable experience teaching in Korea, Anya moved to Belgium to complete a Masters in Continental Philosophy (Magna Cum Laude) specialising in the political thought of Hannah Arendt. She obtained her PhD in Philosophy at the KU Leuven, for which she was awarded the 2008 Auschwitz Foundation Stichting Prize , with a focus on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas and contemporary Jewish thought.
In 2009, she joined an interdisciplinary NWO project as a post-doctoral researcher to consider the application of her theory of relationality in the field of military ethics where she engaged in post-Srebrenica research on responsibility and judgment. In 2012 her research on European Identity and Exclusion, antisemitism and islamophobia, was funded by FWO – Flanders. In addition she was a lecturer at the University of Kent in Brussels in political rhetoric and communication. In 2015 she became an assistant professor in political theory at the Faculty of Management at Radboud University, Nijmegen. In 2018, after being awarded an NWO and a Christine Mohrmann grant, she became an associate professor in ethics and established the foundation for her current research team. In 2023, she began leading an interuniversity interdisciplinary project funded by the NWO’s advancing equity in academia through innovation grant scheme.
Her areas of expertise are: European racism, political philosophy, ethics, European identity and exclusion, gender, antisemitism and islamophobia, political theology, Jewish thought, Arendt, Levinas, ‘Judeo-Christianity’.
For more about Anya, can listen to this radio interview (in Dutch) or check out this interview (in English).
Here is my CV.
Photo Credit: Duncan de Fey