Dr. Kurt C.M. Mertel is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of the Minor Program in Philosophy at the American University of Sharjah. He is the founding editor of Insubordination (s), a book series published with De Gruyter-Brill, and the founder and principal investigator of the Research Group in Aesthetics, Ethics, and Society (RAES).
His research lies at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and social and political philosophy, approached through the frameworks of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and critical social theory. He has co-edited three books in critical social theory and his scholarly work has appeared in leading international journals, including the European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Critical Horizons, the Journal of Philosophy of Education, and the Routledge Handbook of the Phenomenology of Mindfulness, among others.
He is the author of the two-volume scholarly work Re-Thinking the Sociality of the Self: The Emancipatory Project of Being and Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025–), which offers a systematic interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time as a form of critical social ontology and develops an emancipatory reading of fundamental ontology in dialogue with critical theory.
