Bettina G. Bergo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Much of Bettina G. Bergo’s academic career has focused on the relationship between ethics and justice. An assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola College in Maryland, Bergo specializes in phenomenology and contemporary French philosophy. Fluent in French, German, and Swedish, she reads Greek. She has translated several books and journal articles on the French philosopher Emmanual Levinas. She wrote Levinas between Ethics and Politics: For the Beauty That Adorns the Earth (paperback edition, Duquesne University Press, 2001).

Bergo’s current research explores the history of a passion—anxiety—as a theme in European thought from Schopenhauer and Freud to Levinas and Lacan and as a reflection of the struggle concerning the mind-body relationship. Bergo will continue this work during her fellowship year, culminating in a book, “The Passion of ‘Anxiety’: Disorders or Sign?” She expects to trace the central role of anxiety in modern neurology, psychology, and philosophy.

Bergo was a Presidential University fellow and a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, where she earned her PhD in philosophy. She was also an Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen fellow in Vienna in 1989 and a philosophical books winner in a competition held by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in 2000.