Ramona Naddaff’s research and teaching interests encompass the history of ancient rhetorical theory, philosophy and literature, history of philosophy and critical therory, the theory of the novel, and literary censorship. In her book, Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic, Naddaff highlights both the repressive and productive aspects of literary censorship, revealing Plato’s fundamental ambivalence regarding the value of poetic discourse in philosophical and political theory. She continues to write on the discursive dangers of the literary arts in the public sphere, with essays on topics such as Plato, poetry, and art; the writing and censorship of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; and literary censorship trials.
Naddaff is currently finishing a book on Flaubert’s writing philosophy, practices, and collaborations entitled, Never Alone: The Making of Madame Bovary. Never Alone traces the writing, publication, and censorship of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, retelling its compositional process as a tale of influential collaborations; changing identities and unstable boundaries: between author and editor, between author, editor and censor, between lawyer, censor and literary critic.
A co-director and editor of Zone Books, Naddaff oversees the publication of titles philosophy, history, anthropology, political theory and the history of science. She is co-editor of the three-volume Fragments for a History of the Human Body and served as the series editor for the multi-volume anthology Postwar French Thought. Her commitment to undergraduate education led her to found and direct two programs at the Doreen B. Townsend Humanities Center: Course Threads (2008-2010) andArt of Writing (2015-present).
Naddaff has received numerous awards including the Berkeley Discovery Departmental Innovation Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association for Excellence in Teaching, the Humanities Research Fellowship, the Mellon Research and Project Development Grants, the Mellon Fellowship for Digital Humanites, and the ACLS Junior Faculty Fellowship. In Spring 2021, she was a Poetry and the Senses Fellow at the Art Research Center. Additionally, she served on the board of Libraries without Borders for 18 years and currently sits on the Executive Board of Inequality Media
Education: PhD (Philosophy), Boston University
