Dr. Hunter, Leonie

Dr. Hunter, Leonie

Professorship for Philosophy

Studied political theory with a focus on aesthetics in Zurich, Frankfurt and New York; in 2022, obtained a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. 

PhD fellow of the Polytechnische Gesellschaft Frankfurt am Main and the Swiss National Science Foundation at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris; research assistant at Justus Liebig University Giessen; postdoctoral researcher at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome, at Princeton University and at the University of Basel. 

Acting lecturer in the Chair of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Offenbach University of Art and Design. Since 2026, Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Kassel University of the Arts and University of Kassel.

In 2023, ‘The Drama in Politics: Hegel’s Aesthetics as a Treatise on Democratic Theory’ was published, followed in 2024 by ‘Tragic Liberalism’. 

The remit of the professorship encompasses the subject of philosophy in its historical and systematic breadth; however, in her teaching she focuses on the art-theoretical components of the BA and MA degree programmes in Art History at the University of the Arts, as well as the field of aesthetics within the BA and MAprogrammes in the subject of Philosophy. 

In her current research project ‘Technologies of Social Abstraction’, Leonie Hunter examines the relationship between aesthetic, social and technological abstraction. In view of the increasing concentration of economic and infrastructural power in a handful of technology conglomerates and the growing global prevalence of authoritarian social models that programmatically draw on libertarian traditions of thought, the aesthetic promises of freedom inherent in art and their modernist-canonised theorisation require a historically specific redefinition that takes account of the significant material and ideological shifts of the last decade. The associated questions are explored through three interlinked areas of research: firstly, a philosophy of technology that analyses the modes of representation of digital infrastructures; secondly, a critique of the culture industry under the current conditions of anti-democratic (de-)politicisation; and thirdly, research into aesthetic authoritarianism that examines the affective and symbolic dispositives of libertarian formations. The question of the emancipatory potential of aesthetic practices—which may emerge in the face of these historically concrete problems—forms the common framework for research and teaching.