Department of English

About Drew Dalton

Drew M. Dalton is the author of Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire (Duquesne University Press, 2009), The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism (Northwestern University Press, 2023). In addition to these longer works, Dalton has published a number of shorter pieces in various journals and edited volumes and has been featured by a variety of popular magazines including Aeon, The Conversation, Arts and Letters Daily, amongst others.

Dalton received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Leuven (BE) in conjunction with the Husserl Archives and the Center for Social and Political Philosophy in 2006. Before joining the Department of English at Indiana University in 2024, Dalton was a Professor of Philosophy and the Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dominican University.

Dalton’s research focuses on the normative implications of different metaphysical systems. Specifically, he’s interested in how questions of right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and pleasure are framed within aesthetics, literary theory, ethics, and political philosophy and how those frameworks can be critiqued and/or revitalized through the ontologies theorized within German Idealism, Pessimism, Phenomenology, Speculative Materialism, and Psychoanalysis.

Outside of his professional interests, Dalton is an amateur guitarist, a dedicated long-distance runner, a lover of modern architecture, a collector of vintage stereo equipment, and an oatmeal cookie aficionado.