Future graduate student research opportunities: Faculty of Arts
What kinds of archives do people create when everything around them is being destroyed? In the face of escalating global crises—ecological collapse, forced displacement to authoritarianism, and colonial erasure—archives have become more than repositories of the past.
From earthquake-stricken Turkey to occupied Palestine and post-apartheid South Africa, marginalized communities are reclaiming the archive as a living practice: a means of confronting loss, asserting existence, and imagining alternative futures. Grounded in anthropology and engaging history, law, digital humanities, and political theory, this project rethinks the archive as an affective, multi-temporal entity—as both method and modality through which scholars and communities contest dominant narratives, co-produce knowledge and respond to the urgency of the present in pursuit of justice.
We are looking for ambitious graduate students to conduct projects within the Wise Judgment Consortium, which brings together an international team of researchers to study how culture shapes the way we make decisions. Our work is highly interdisciplinary, combining psychology, natural language processing (including Large Language Models), computational modelling, and psychometrics to understand the complex ways cultural, ecological, and situational factors influence everyday decision-making.
Since time immemorial, not only migration to new lands have been standard patterns of human behaviour, but also the creation of narratives that commemorate founding heroes and provide aetiologies for topographical or cultural features. Most accounts still contain some historical information, others are entirely fictitious (think only of Romulus and Remus suckled by the she-wolf). Yet even the wildest fabrications articulate ethnic identity and inter-ethnic relations. The present research project is concerned with the identity constructs enshrined in such ancient foundation legends.
Boredom has been cast as a push to action - to find something more engaging. We recently theorized that this signal arises when our cognitive and neural resources are under (or over) utilized. In other words, a basic drive (in both humans and animals) is the drive to optimally deploy our cognitive and neural resources. Our lab is now in the process of designing tasks to test this novel hypothesis, one that we think extends beyond boredom.
Hellenistic history is en vogue, and it seems that the Seleukids have dethroned the long-time favourite Ptolemies in the recent wave of scholarly production. With their core territories Syria and Babylonia, and their rule extending further over much of Asia Minor, Media, Elymais, Persia, Parthia, and Baktria, the Seleukids controlled the largest of the Hellenistic kingdoms after the death of Alexander the Great. They energetically reshaped the political and cultic landscape of uncountable peoples and cities in the Near East, creating an impressive legacy. Although the violent conflicts with the Judaeans under Antiochos IV Epiphanes largely denigrated their image, at least in the Biblical tradition, and the defeat of Antiochos III Megas by the Romans at Magnesia further damaged their reputation, such perspectives from hindsight should not mislead us in our assessment of the most powerful and highly resilient dynasty of the early and middle Hellenistic periods.
Work on topics of your choosing in social and political philosophy of language, under the supervision of Jennifer Saul.
Work on topics of your choosing related to philosophy of economics under the supervision of Patricia Marino. The broader department includes experts in philosophy of science and methodology (Doreen Fraser, Carla Fehr, Katie Plaisance), political philosophy (Jennifer Saul, Laura Mae Lindo, Katy Fulfer, Chris Lowry) and public policy (Mathieu Doucet).