Committee Elections 2026

Candidates

Secretary: Justyna Galant

Justyna Galant served as Utopian Studies Society/Europe secretary in the years 2017–2023. She has been an active member of USS/E since 2009, attending every conference of the Society since that date. She organised – in the capacity of conference secretary – two of the Society’s events – the 2010 11th Utopian Studies Society International Conference, The Spectres of Utopia, UMCS, Lublin, Poland, and the 2017 18th Utopian Studies Society International Conference, Solidarity and Utopia, University of Gdańsk & European Solidarity Centre, Gdańsk, Poland. More recently, in May 2024, she organised the conference Utopia for the Future in Gdańsk. Continuing the project of the late Professor Artur Blaim, she is currently managing a grant from the Polish Ministry of Education for the translation of nineteen volumes of international utopian literature into Polish. Her research interests focus on utopia and dystopia in literature, comics, drama, and the works of Lionel Britton.

EDI Officer: Marta Komsta

Marta Komsta is Assistant Professor at Maria Skłodowska-Curie University in Lublin, Poland, in the Faculty of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Her research interests and publications focus mainly on representations of utopia and dystopia in film and literature (19th-century and contemporary), cultural semiotics, and ecocriticism. She has been an active member of Utopian Studies Society/Europe since 2009; she also holds the position of the USS/E’s EDI Officer for the period 2024-2026. She co-organised the 11th USS/E conference “Spectres of Utopia” (2010, Lublin, Poland) and the 18th USS/E conference “Solidarity and Utopia” (2017, Gdańsk, Poland). In addition to her current role as the EDI Officer, she has extensive administrative experience as a year tutor, providing first-hand academic and administrative assistance to students and acting as their liaison with the Dean’s Office.

Treasurer: Kenneth Hanshew

Kenneth Hanshew is employed at the Bohemicum – Center for Czech Studies at the University of Regensburg, where he began working in 2004 as an assistant and associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures after graduate studies at the University of Illinois (UIUC). After his first book on the character Švejk across European literatures and a project on Euroskepticism, he completed his post-doctoral thesis (habilitation) on the intersection of early western and Slavic utopias and science fiction in literature and has published on Czech, Russian, Polish and Serbian and Croatian literature and films, concentrating on the study of posthumanism, utopianism and science fiction and including authors from B to Z, from Faddei Bulgarin to Evgeny Zamyatin.

Member of Committee: Diane Morgan

I would very much like to get more involved with the workings of the USS as a member of the committee. I have been a regular attender of and contributor to the Annual Conference ever since 2005 (when it was held at New Lanark). I have been teaching a module entitled “The State of Utopia” for decades, both at the University of Northampton and at University of Leeds.  Both for my teaching and for my research, the discussions at the USS conferences have been invaluable for keeping me abreast of developments in the field.

My particular areas of interest in Utopian Studies are “Kantian” cosmopolitics and C19th French Utopian Socialism. I am current working on two monographs in these fields:  Kant, Cosmopolitics and Globality (for Palgrave, Macmillan 2027) and The Affirmation of Social Values in the Work of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Proudhon for Palgrave/ Macmillan, Utopian Studies series ed. G. Claeys (2027/8).

Here follows a selection of my publications related to Utopian Studies:

  • “Le dernier homme chez Saint-Simon” in Saint-Simon, le fondateur des fondateurs.  Bicentenaire de Henri Saint-Simon ed. P. Musso (Hermann 2026).
  • « Vers l’art total illimité, « fouriériste » : « L’illusion créée », ou les charmes paradoxaux de la vie collective » for Ici-et-ailleurs.org (28/08/2025).
  • “Se promener avec un vagabond: René Schérer, un géophilosophe anarcho-fouriériste” in Cahiers Charles Fourier issue : “René Schérer, un fouriérisme alerte” (2024 no.35, 2).
  • “Utopia and Architecture” in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia ed. C. Shrank & P. Withington (Oxford University Press 2024).“Anarchism, utopianism and hospitality: the work of René Schérer” in Modern & Contemporary France Special issue: Y’en a pas un sur cent et pourtant ils existent: Anarchist and anarchism in France since 1945” (Routledge, vol. 24, no. 2, May 2016).
  • “La transmission dans le temps de l’Idée : “ce météore [lancé] sur les masses électrisées” in Revue d’études proudhoniennes REP (1, 2015). https://www.proudhon.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6_
  • “Le Corbusier’s “L’asile flottant”, the Armée du salut, and Le Corbusier: A Modernist Heterotopian /Utopian Project” in Utopian Studies Special Issue: Utopia and Architecture, ed. N. Coleman (Vol 25, no. 1, 2014) https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.25.1.0087; abridged version L’asile flotant: Modernist Reflections by the Armée du salut and Le Corbusier on the Refuge/Refuse of Modernity” in The Globalization of Space ed P. Mariangela & J. Miller (Pickering & Chatto 2015).
  • “The Flat Management of “Crises” on our Spherical Planet: Anarchist Order for a Sustainable Future” in Yesterday’s Tomorrows ed. Pere Gallardo & Liz Russell (Cambridge Scholars 2014).
  • “Globus Terraqueus: Cosmopolitan Right, “Fluid Geography” and Commercium in the Utopian Thinking of Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon” in Law and the Utopian Imagination, ed. A. Sarat et al, Amherst Series, (Stanford University Press 2013)
  • “ ‘The Camel (ship of the desert)’: “Fluid Geography”, Globality, Cosmopolitics in the Work of Immanuel Kant” in The Epistemology of Utopia: Rhetoric, Theory and Imagination” ed. Jorge Bastos da Silva, (Cambridge Scholars, 2013).
  • “Are you working enthusiastically?”: Fourier, Proudhon and the serial organization of the workplace” in Parallax 59 ed. F. Ventrella, special issue on Enthusiasm (Routledge 2011).
  • “Saint-Simon, Fourier and Proudhon: “Utopian” French Socialism” in Vol. I (1780-1840)  History of Continental Philosophy General Editor A. Schrift, Volume Editor T. Nenon  (Acumen Press, 2010).

Member of Committee: Philipp P. Thapa

I found my way to the Utopian Studies Society Europe after chancing upon the invitation to its 2018 conference in Tarragona. At that point, as an environmental ethics lecturer at the University of Greifswald, Germany, I had been working on and with the idea of utopian imagination for a few years. During that time, I had contributed articles to a handbook of environmental ethics on both ecotopianism and environmental pragmatism, approaches that turned out to be surprisingly related. I had (co-)taught seminars on ecotopian imagination in novels by Ursula K. Le Guin and in other works (including the animation film WALL-E). The recent master’s graduate who travelled with me to Tarragona had, under my supervision, written a thesis interpreting her rural co-living community as an ecotopian experiment. After the Tarragona conference, thrilled to have found the utopian studies community, I immediately began organising a regional networking meeting under the auspices of the USSE that took place in Greifswald the same November. However, my employment at the local university ended shortly thereafter.

Since then, among other things, I have co-edited a special issue on utopian imagination for sustainable economies (Gebauer and Thapa 2021), written about the relationship of moral, religious and utopian patterns of thought in the environmental movement (Thapa 2020), and argued for utopian (or radical) imagination as a competence to be developed in Education for Sustainable Development (Thapa and Lüdtke 2025, based on Lüdtke, Thapa and Zerbe 2024). I have also conducted a few workshops on utopian thinking for education professionals and taught an ecotopian seminar for the Rachel Carson Center at LMU Munich. However, through the years 2020–23, circumstances kept me away from the USSE conferences and from extensive engagement with the community.

In 2023, I brought a project to the Sustainable Europe Research Institute SERI Germany, where I’d become an (unpaid) fellow in 2022. The Big Green is funded through the European Commission’s Creative Europe programme, i.e., as an arts and culture project, and develops practices and policies for ecological sustainability in that sector as well as artistic formats that promote the idea of sustainable development. As the philosophical researcher in the project, I’ve taken to promoting the use of the utopian imagination both in public talks and individual conversations with cultural organisers and artists. And since 2023, I’ve been able to participate in the USSE Conferences again every year. In 2024, I used my new connections to organise a small utopian art exhibition attached to the USSE Conference in Budapest and involve a few colleagues from the network of The Big Green in the conference programme.

For me, it is the very way that the subjects, methods, and traditions of utopianism sprawl across disciplines, times, and cultures while being united by an underlying, very human form of thinking, which makes me feel at home in our field of study (and practice). The perceived diversity of the USSE Conferences in 2018 and 2019, including various presentations by artists, philosophers, political scientists, community researchers, and others, brought this home to me. In recent years, the participation of researchers and practitioners outside literature studies seems to have waned. To stem this trend, I’ve offered the USSE Committee to help reach out and maintain relationships with diverse communities, in academia and beyond. I’m grateful to the Committee for its goodwill in co-opting me earlier this year and would be honoured if the members of the Society confirmed my appointment with their votes.

My role outside the Society may soon change in any number of ways. The Big Green ends in mid-2027, but since our Institute may not be able to pre-finance the last year of my employment as a researcher in the project, I’m already applying for positions in citizen participation and environmental education. Alternatively, I might delve into freelancing with events and courses based on environmental philosophy and utopianism, at least until family circumstances free me finally to leave Greifswald, hopefully next year. Once upon a time, I studied Landscape Ecology and Nature Conservation with the intention of returning to the kind of work in which I had participated as a young volunteer in Nepal, my father’s country. The work had captivated me both because it involved a lot of hiking and because collaborating with local communities around conservation areas was a hands-on way to help build a beautiful future. In other words, my dream job was a combination of two utopian mainstays of my boyhood, i.e., scouting and Star Trek. Then again, new project jobs may enable me to continue in my present, academia-adjacent role for a little longer.

My point is, I would love to help maintain and develop the Society as an intellectual and creative hub for people of diverse backgrounds, and I’m in it for the long haul.

Current affiliations

  • Sustainable Europe Research Institute SERI Germany — Fellow and Principal Investigator for The Big Green — seri.de
  • Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE) — Visiting Lecturer in Environmental Ethics — hnee.de/en

Selected publications

  • Gebauer, Jana, and Philipp P. Thapa, eds. 2021. “Utopisieren: Zukunftsfähige Ökonomien denken und verwirklichen.” Ökologisches Wirtschaften 36 (3): 14–29. https://oekologisches-wirtschaften.de/index.php/oew/issue/view/164.
  • Lüdtke, Kim Alina, Philipp P. Thapa, and Stefan Zerbe. 2024. “Can Education for Sustainable Development Support Climate Change Adaptation Effectively? A Delphi Study of Germany’s Non‐Formal Education Sector.” European Journal of Education 60 (1). https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12797.
  • Thapa, Philipp P., and Kim Alina Lüdtke. 2025. “Die Fähigkeit, trotzdem weiterzumachen, aber anders.” Handprint-Hub. https://www.handprint-hub.de/die-faehigkeit-trotzdem-weiterzumachen-aber-anders.
  • Thapa, Philipp P. 2024. “Ecotopianism: Towards a Philosophical Conception.” In Greentopia: Utopian Thought in the Anthropocene, edited by Angela Kallhoff and Eva Liedauer, vol. 36. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56802-2.
  • Thapa, Philipp P. 2020. “Moralische, religiöse und utopische Muster in der Umweltbewegung und ihre[n] Marktnischen.” In Öko-Spiritualität: Ganzheitliche Lebensweisen auf den »Märkten des Besonderen«, edited by Hagen Fischer, Klaus Hock, and Thomas Klie. Transcript.
  • Thapa, Philipp P. 2016. “Ökotopismus.” In Handbuch Umweltethik, edited by Konrad Ott, Jan Dierks, and Lieske Voget-Kleschin. J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05193-6_33.

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