Jonathan Egid - Biography
Hi, I’m Jonathan. I was born in South-East London and raised in a small village in Warwickshire. I'm writing a PhD at King's College London, supervised by Sara Marzagora and Toby Green on the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob, exploring Ethiopian literature and philosophy, oriental scholarship in the shadow of empire, Ge'ez philology and varieties of philosophical rationalism and critique. One major aim of the project, besides bringing these neglected works to a wider audience, is to use the Ḥatäta to think about different ways of writing the history of philosophy, in particular what a truly global history of philosophy would look like. I am a British Society for the History of Philosophy Postgraduate Fellow for the 2023-4 academic year.
Before starting at King’s, I worked as a tutor in a Greek language school, a convent in Hampstead and the suburbs of north London. Before that I read for the BPhil in Philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford, where I wrote a thesis about ‘the anxiety of alternatives’ and relativism with Prof A.W. Moore. Before that I lived in a small village in Crete and studied at the University of Kent in Canterbury, having spent a year as an exchange student at the Université Paris IV – la Sorbonne.
Some of the writers I love most are: Amos Oz, Vassily Grossman, Nikos Kazantzakis, Ursula le Guin, John Berger, Milan Kundera, Zadie Smith, Isaac Babel, W.G Sebald. Musically I like Psarantonis, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Debussy, Mulatu Astatke, Kendrick Lamar, Zohar Argov. My favourite places in the world are Mull, Ein Gedi and Sfakia, where the above photograph was taken.