Visiting scholars

How to become a visiting scholar at the IRH-ICUB

Visiting scholars are researchers from other institutions who are caring out their research projects, supported by external funds, at the IRH-ICUB. The duration of the stay is ranging from several weeks to several months.

If you want to become a visiting scholar of the IRH-ICUB, please send us a research proposal and a CV.

2016 – 2017

Andrei Mărăşoiu (15 June – 10 August 2017) is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and a fellow of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. Andrei also received an MA in Neurophilosophy from Georgia State University (2013) and one in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Bucharest (2010). Andrei’s dissertation project is about what it is to understand something. This is a topic at the crossroads of the metaphysics of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Given his background, Andrei pursues his project on understanding with an eye to finding points of contact between the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He is especially interested in what impact conscious experiences of understanding (so-called “Aha!” moments) have for our knowledge, and how they are grounded in skilled, attentive, and reflective problem-solving. Andrei will be presenting part of his research at the Aristotelian Society (in July) and the Eastern APA meeting (January 2018).

Giulia Lasagni (15 September 2016 – 14 September 2017) is pursuing her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Parma (Italy). Her research is focused on the idea of shared agency and the way in which the contemporary debate in Social Ontology has considered the notions of group agent, collective intentionality and practice. In order to develop her project, she was visiting (August 2015 – April 2016) at the Columbia University in the City of New York and attended a doctoral course in Social Theory at the New School for Social Research (NYC). She is a member of the editorial board of I Quaderni della Ginestra and La Società degli Individui.

2015 – 2016

Cristina Plamadeala (July 2016) is pursuing a joint PhD Humanities at Concordia University (Montreal) and in Philosophy at the L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). Her dissertation concerns the ways, the reasons, motives, ways and degrees in which people became collaborators and opponents of the Romanian communist State. Prior to her doctoral studies, she has also worked for several American institutions, as well as Canadian think tanks that specialize in public policy research.

Michael Deckard (October 2015 – January 2016) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, NC. His specialty is in History of Modern Philosophy and Aesthetics. He has taught courses in history of philosophy (ancient, medieval, and modern), historical and environmental aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, hermeneutics and phenomenology, applied ethics (particularly medical ethics and the ethics of war and peace),  Native American philosophy, and history and philosophy of science. He is program coordinator of the Philosophy Department at Lenoir-Rhyne, serves on the Ethics Advisory Council at the Catawba Valley Medical Center and is a Board member for Exodus Homes, a halfway house for men and women who are transitioning from prison back into mainstream society. He is a Fulbright Scholar at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Bucharest for 2015-2016.

Adrian Currie (October – December 2015) is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary’s philosophy department, and is visiting the Institute for Research in the Humanities until the end of December. His main research focus is the epistemic situation and status of the so-called ‘historical sciences’ (paleontology, archaeology, etc…). Accounts of historical evidence typically suggest an epistemic pessimism about our capacity to uncover the past by emphasizing the degradation of evidence: over time, the past’s signal decays. And yet, the historical sciences have proven extremely successful at discovering and explaining the past. Adrian argues this tension is resolved once we realize that historical evidence is richer than earlier accounts allow for. He emphasizes the ‘methodological omnivory’ of historical science: in investigating the past, scientists are opportunistic, employing a diverse array of targeted epistemic tools. In addition to this focus, Adrian has also worked on issues in the philosophy of biology, such as the nature of homology and homoplasy as well as species concepts, and in the philosophy of science more generally – particularly on the nature of, and relationship between, experiments, observations and models. For papers and further information visit his website at https://sites.google.com/site/adrianmitchellcurrie/.