Dr Caitríona Ni Dhúill, Durham University January - March 2013
Caitríona Ní Dhúill lectures in German at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham. Her interests lie in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German, Austrian, and comparative literature; utopian fiction and theory; gender theory; and biography. Since completing her PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 2005, Dr Ní Dhúill has taught at the universities of St Andrews, Durham and V ienna. She convenes the research group Literature History Theory,and is co-editor of the journal Austrian Studies. She is also an affiliate of the Centre for Medical Humanities.
Her research aims to bring the collective fantasy of utopia into dialogue with the singular ‘reality’ of biography, and to show that these two categories are not as far apart from each other as it might seem. Her first book, Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch (2010), examines the re-imagined sex-gender systems of past futures, and offers a critical account of the relationship between gender discourse and utopian thought. Dr Ní Dhúill has also published widely in the fields of modern German and Austrian literature, with recent and forthcoming articles on Hofmannsthal, Bachmann, Wedekind, Trojanow and Bloch.
Her current research project, Lives of Others, locates its primary materials in the literature and philosophy of German and European modernism, and starts by confronting the limitations of biography as a hermeneutic framework for the reception of literature. While committed to the view that biographical approaches are an integral part of any culture’s engagement with the past, the project seeks to reconstruct an antibiographical tradition in which the questioning or refusal of the biographical paradigm leads to alternative, disenchanted, yet creative approaches to the traces of past lives and the narratives they generate.
During the period of her IAS Fellowship, she plans to complete a chapter of her monograph Lives of Others, and will be actively involved with the research activities around ‘Narrating Time’ and ‘Living Time.’
Dr Simon Prosser, University of St. Andrews St. Mary’s College
October – December 2012
Simon Prosser is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. Following a childhood interest in astronomy he studied physics at the University of Birmingham, graduating with a BSc in Physics with Theoretical Physics. He eventually realised that the kinds of questions that had initially drawn him to physics and astronomy were philosophical questions rather than scientific ones. He then studied philosophy at the University of Warwick gaining his PhD in 2002. Following graduation he has been employed at the University of St Andrews.
His research interests range over a number of topics in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. One major research interest concerns the nature of conscious experience and the relation between the subjective character of experience and its representational content - the way it represents the world as being. This interest covers all forms of experience, but Prosser also has a particular interest in the nature of our experience of time. He is an advocate of the B-theory of time, according to which although times or events exist and are ordered relative to one another by relations of earlierand later, there is no objective present, and hence no metaphysical asymmetry between the present and other times; what we call the ‘present’ is simply the time at which a given ‘now’-thought occurs, in much the same way that what we call ‘here’ is the place at which a given ‘here’-thought occurs. Prosser is currently working on an explanation for this illusion – an account of why time seems to us to pass, given the view that that there is no real passage of time.
Prosser’s work has been published in prominent philosophy journals including, among others, The Philosophical Quarterly, Mind & Language, Philosophical Studies, Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and The Philosophical Review. While at the IAS in Durham he will be working on issues relating to the perception of change and the doctrine of the ‘specious present,’ according to which conscious perceptual experience encompasses an extended interval of time rather than an instant.
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