Mitchell Damian Murtagh is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Emory University in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from The Literature Program at Duke University which he received in 2021 along with certificates in Feminist Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine. He completed his B.A. at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in English and Philosophy. His research spans feminist and anti-racist philosophy, trans studies, twentieth-century French and German Continental philosophy, and philosophy of science, particularly physics. His manuscript-in-progress, A Meta-Physics of Sexual Difference: The Matrix of Quantum Gravity, The Embryogenesis of Our Universe, applies Luce Irigaray’s psychoanalytic feminist critique of Western philosophy’s dominant phallocentric tradition to reading contemporary physics to argue that the desire for a universal theory, or theory of grand unification, is ultimately a phallocentric desire. Instead, A Meta-Physics of Sexual Difference formalizes a relational model of reality vis-à-vis Raymond Ruyer’s concept of embryogenesis. Broadly conceived, Professor Murtagh’s interests and teaching stage cross-disciplinary dialogues around ontological questions. Whether addressing fundamental physics or transsexual being, Murtagh’s work thinks through the political and ethical implications of an ontology of (sexual) difference. He is the 2019 Recipient of The Irigaray Circle’s Karen Burke Memorial Prize and has been published in philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Transcontinental Feminism,  Horizons of Difference: Rethinking Space, Place, and Identity with Irigaray (2022), and What is Sexual Difference?: Thinking With Irigaray (2023).