Brian Willems

Brian Willems
Role:	Essay contributor
BSG Universe:	Re-imagined Series
Date of Birth:
Date of Death:	Missing required parameter 1=month! ,
Nationality:	USA
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Brian Willems is an American academic and writer who contributed the essay "When the Non-Human Knows Its Own Death" to Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Knowledge Here Begins Out There (Blackwell Publishing, 2008). Born in Minnesota, he teaches literature and film theory at the University of Split in Croatia, where he holds the rank of Associate Professor, and completed his doctorate in Media and Communication at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Academic career

The essay Willems contributed to the BSG philosophy volume, edited by Jason T. Eberl, appears in Part II of the collection ("I, Cylon: Are Toasters People, Too?") on pages 87–98, at the time of publication Willems was completing his doctorate at the European Graduate School.

His first book, Hopkins and Heidegger (Continuum, 2009), examined cross-sections between the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, focused on Hopkins' concepts of inscape and instress in relation to Heidegger's accounts of appropriation (Ereignis) and the fourfold (das Geviert). His 2010 monograph Facticity, Poverty and Clones: On Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (Atropos Press) was the first book-length study of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel, reading its treatment of clone characters through continental philosophy to argue for a reconception of ontological difference between human and non-human subjects. He also co-edited The First Ten Years of English Studies in Split (Split University, 2011).

Shooting the Moon (Zero Books, 2015) applied methods from object-oriented philosophy to cinematic representations of lunar landings, mapping the different ways film constructs indirect access to objects. Speculative Realism and Science Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) placed science fiction by Cormac McCarthy, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, and Kim Stanley Robinson alongside speculative materialist philosophers including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, and Jane Bennett to develop and test arguments against philosophical anthropocentrism. Zero Books also published his experimental novella Henry, Henry that year.

Sham Ruins: A User's Guide (Routledge, 2022) traced the concept of the fake Gothic ruin from 18th-century English landscape gardens and extended it into a general principle for understanding objects that impose meaning where such meaning does not belong. In 2023 he co-edited Global Manifestos for the 21st Century (foreword by Yanis Varoufakis) with Nicol Barria-Asenjo and Slavoj Žižek. His first novel, The Surviving Cells, was published by Les Fugitives in 2025.

Willems translates from Croatian into English, including work by Jurica Pavičić. He has directed the Studia Mediterranea centre at the University of Split, guest lectured in the UK, USA, the Middle East, and continental Europe, and curated exhibitions of new media artists in Croatia and Slovenia.

References