An Interview with Gadamer Chair Professor Sara Heinämaa

Sara Heinämaa is a Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and served as Academy Professor at the Academy of Finland from 2017 to 2021. She has also held the Gadamer Professorship at Boston College in 2026. Her work focuses on embodiment, intersubjectivity, temporality, emotions, normality, and sexual difference, drawing on the phenomenological traditions of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Stein, Beauvoir, Levinas, and Irigaray, while also contributing to Descartes studies and classical existentialism.

Heinämaa’s research project Marginalization and Experience: Phenomenological Analyses of Normality and Abnormality (MEPA) examines the foundations of human sociality and the role of experiential normality and abnormality in shaping intersubjectivity. Her books include Birth, Death, and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment (with Robin May Schott, Vigdis Songe-Møller, and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir) and Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. She has published widely in leading journals on topics such as personhood, perception, pregnancy, and the structure of human experience.