Lincoln Professor, New College of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

Martin Beck Matustik
Professor of Humanities, Arts, & Cultural Studies

Professor of Philosophy

Contact: Martin.Matustik@asu.edu
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Martin Beck Matustík, a newly appointed Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Religion at Arizona State University, has joined the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at ASUW in the Fall 2008. He has been teaching at Purdue University after earning his Ph.D. from Fordham University in 1991.

Matustík is author of six single author books, two edited collections, and a co-editor with Patricia Huntington of New Critical Theory, a series at Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Among his books are Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (1993); Specters of Liberation: Great Refusals in the New World Order (1998); Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (2001); and Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (1995), co-edited with Merold Westphal. His most recent book, Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations, was published in June 2008 by Indiana University Press.

Matustík, originally from Czechoslovakia, was 11 when the Soviet tanks invaded Prague. In 1969, at 12, Matustík published a photo from the funeral of Jan Palach, a Charles University philosophy student who immolated himself in protest of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that took place in August 1968. While a first-year student at Charles University, at 19, Matustík signed "Charta 77," the Czechoslovak manifesto for human rights, issued in January 1977 by Vaclav Havel, Jan Patoèka, and Jiøí Hájek. He became a political refugee in August of that year. As a Fulbright student of Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt a/M in 1989, he witnessed the historical November fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia that lead to the election of Václav Havel as the first Czechoslovak President after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Matustík lectured at Prague's Charles University as a Fulbright fellow in 1995.