Jessica Ruffin — an affiliated faculty member based in MIT Literature — is a critical philosopher, media historian, and moving-image enthusiast. Her research and creative work approach ethics as a problem of environmental and historical relation. Ruffin has particular interest in how Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s aesthetics share poetic and temporal resonance with Black and Indigenous thought.
Her current book project,
Becoming Amphibious: the question of ethics in white supremacist worlding, is an auto-philosophical genealogy—weaving German aesthetics, Black studies, paleontology, and media philosophy in search of ethical movements appropriate to contemporary crises. She has published essays in
New German Critique,
qui parle, and
Millennium Film Journal. Ruffin was associate producer for the Aubin Picture’s documentary
Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity (2014) and was pre-production coordinator for the films
Chavela (2017) and
Dispatches from Cleveland (2017) before returning to academia in 2015.
