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

Book review

• 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

• 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

• 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
• 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

• 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
• Hickmott, S. (2015). (En) Corps Sonore: Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Sonotropism”. French Studies, 69(4), 479-493. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knv152