The position ad for the 2025-26 postdoctoral fellowships has now posted. Please consult this page.
2024-2025 Postdoctoral Fellows
Ariel MelamedoffAriel Melamedoff is an Extending New Narratives Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University. He previously completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at New York University in 2024. Ariel’s research concerns metaphysics and epistemology in the history of modern philosophy, especially as these are related to the foundations of science. His work situates Mary Shepherd’s philosophy within the context of the fragmentation of scientific research that occurred in the early 19th century, arguing that she was an early proponent of an emergentist approach to the unification of science. During the tenure of the ENN fellowship, he is focusing on Shepherd’s theory of cognition and its role in scientific reasoning.
Louis DoulasLouis Doulas is an Extending New Narratives Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University. Before this, he completed his PhD in Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. His research is both historical and theoretical, focusing on the origins and development of early analytic philosophy (with special attention to the works of G.E. Moore and Susan Stebbing) as well as various issues in contemporary epistemology. His postdoctoral research project, Inspired by Ideals, Guided by Action, reconstructs Susan Stebbing’s moral philosophy, situating it within the turbulent moral and political context of the early twentieth century.
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Michael VeldmanMichael Veldman is a postdoctoral fellow in the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project, based at Western University. Veldman studies the metaphysics and epistemology of classical physics, focusing on Enlightenment thinkers like Emilie Du Chatelet, Leonhard Euler, and Pierre de Maupertuis. His research focuses on causation and explanation — in particular, how concepts, practices, and norms related to them shifted during the Enlightenment. In this regard, he is particularly interested in the role played by mathematization. For example, he has studied how mathematizing certain metaphysical claims about the "economy of Nature" in the 1740s (the so-called "principle of least action") created a new opening for formal, mathematical criticism of teleology, or explanation of phenomena in terms of "purposes" or "goals." This is one of several cases he studies of new forms of mutual antagonism and critique that emerged between metaphysics, physics, and mathematics. Veldman's postdoctoral project is focused on Du Chatelet's Dissertation on the nature and propagation of fire. The Dissertation, which in 1739 made Du Chatelet the first woman to be published by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, is rarely discussed in the literature on her thought. In one forthcoming paper, he lays out the poorly understood scientific context of the work and its reception and influence. A second forthcoming paper analyzes philosophical differences between the first and second editions of the work, pointing out how the earlier Du Chatelet leveraged heterodox metaphysics for scientific purposes. A third paper will argue that the Dissertation informs a deeper appreciation of Du Chatelet's influential contribution to hypothetical methods. Veldman received his PhD from Duke University in 2024.
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2023-2024 Postdoctoral Fellows
Katie Brennan |
Geneviève Barrette |
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Katie Brennan is a postdoctoral fellow in the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project at The University of Western Ontario. Her research focuses on life affirmation, especially as developed in the work of nineteenth-century philosophers. Life affirmation describes the process of coming to see life as worthwhile and filled with meaning, even in the face of great suffering. She addresses this problem in two main contexts: the aesthetic and the social/political. In the aesthetic context, Brennan works on Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of life affirmation through art and artistry. In the social/political context, Brennan analyzes life affirmation from a feminist perspective in order to demonstrate how social and political considerations make life affirmation more difficult for oppressed groups. Her post-doctoral project focuses on the work of Hedwig Dohm (1833-1919), an early German feminist who advocates for universal suffrage and criticizes gender structures that keep women from coming to affirm their lives. Like many of her contemporaries, Dohm was concerned with the self-realization (and by extension life affirmation) of women, which, she claims, was hindered by nineteenth century politics and society. For Dohm, self-realization contains both political and existential dimensions. Participation in political life is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for equality. In addition, one must live in a society that allows for one’s self-realization. Brennan’s project explores Dohm’s feminist epistemology and theory of oppression. Brennan received her PhD from Temple University in 2019.
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Geneviève Barrette is a postdoctoral fellow in the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project at McGill University. Her postdoctoral project consists in specifying philosophical elements of Marguerite Porete's speculative mysticism. Porete's only surviving work is The Mirror of the Simple Souls. This work is an edification treatise, describing the steps toward the mystical union. Condemned and burned with its author in 1310, the book continued to circulate anonymously until its authorship was established in 1946. Extensive research has been done on Porete and her Mirror, but the philosophical dimensions of this work remain understudied. Barrette aims to document three fundamental elements of Porete's thought: the relation between the moral virtues and the mystical state, the role of the intellectual faculties in the mystical economy, and the paradoxical idea of true liberty as submissiveness to God. More broadly, Barrette's research focuses on the history of ideas in the 13th and 14th centuries, and of their relation to the various forms that censorship took at the time. Her work has notably led her to appreciate the influence of Godefroid de Fontaines (d. 1306/9) on the ontology of the Dominican Hervé de Nédellec (d. 1323), an influence which contrasts him on several important points with Thomas Aquinas, of whom Hervé is thought to be an inveterate defender. Geneviève Barrette received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Montréal in 2021. She is a philosophy instructor at Collège Ahunstic, Montréal.
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2022-23 Postdoctoral Fellows
Elena Gordon |
Mickaëlle Provost |
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Elena Gordon received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Sydney in 2021. She was previously an Anderson Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney for 2022, before taking up her position as an Extending New Narratives Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at McGill University. She mainly works in early modern philosophy, and she has forthcoming work on David Hume’s account of fictions and childhood development in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. Her project for Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy examines Catharine Macaulay's (1731-1791) philosophy of education, with a particular focus on her Letters on Education (1790). This project will examine the essential role that Macaulay takes non-human animals to have in human moral and epistemic development, and it seeks to draw attention to Macaulay’s criticisms of the dominant narratives that existed in her time about exactly what education ought to cultivate in the developing minds of children and how it ought to do so. This research therefore furthers the aims of the Extending New Narratives Project by expanding the canonically familiar understanding of the discussions about the human/animal difference and the role and aims of education that were taking place in the early modern period.
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Mickaëlle Provost is a postdoctoral fellow in the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project at Dalhousie University. Her post-doc will focus on Anna Julia Cooper’s thought by paying attention to the philosophical dimension of her work and its inscription in the African American history of the end of the 19th century (since the end of the Civil War in 1865) and the beginning of the 20th century. Cooper's importance to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois will be explored through a comparative study of A Voice from the South, The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. Mickaëlle Provost received her Phd in Philosophy in 2022 from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Previously, she was a Visiting Scholar at Bergen University (Norway) and at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses mainly on feminist philosophy, the phenomenology of racial and sexist oppression and the history of black feminism in the United States.
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Michaela Manson
Michaela completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Toronto (2022). Her dissertation, Mind and Prejudice: Cognitive Improvement in the Philosophies of René Descartes and Mary Astell, focused on the question of what these thinkers take to explain the human potential for cognitive improvement. More generally, her interests centre around the early modern period, particularly questions about mind and cognition in connection with moral philosophy. In 2018, Michaela received the Jan Wojcik Memorial Prize for graduate students in history of philosophy for research about Mary Astell. As an Extending New Narratives Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Monash University, Michaela will continue this research by focusing on early modern accounts of friendship, especially as presented by women philosophers.
2021-22 Postdoctoral Fellows
Jorge Sanchez Perez |
Elliott Chen |
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Jorge Sanchez Perez was a postdoctoral fellow in the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project at Simon Fraser University. His post-doc research focused on analyzing and reconstructing early modern metaphysical concepts from Andean philosophy. The primary source for his research is the Huarochirí Manuscript, which is the only known document of the period between the 16th and 17th century containing a detailed account of the worldview of the Quechua people. As part of the project, he will develop tools for bridging the gap between Indigenous and Western philosophical views. Dr. Sanchez Perez received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2021 from McMaster University. Previously, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on Global Justice with an emphasis on Indigenous and Latin American philosophical views. He also works on legal philosophy with a special interest in the intersection of law and morality.
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Elliott D. Chen was a postdoctoral fellow on the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project at Western University. His postdoctoral research was on Laura Bassi (1711-1778). The project was to translate, reconstruct, and analyze Bassi's work on electricity, with special attention to her use of analogical reasoning in developing theories of novel physical phenomena. Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2021 from the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. His primary research interests are in the history of philosophy of science, especially the intersection of physics and metaphysics. He also maintains research interests in contemporary philosophy of physics, particularly the foundations of classical field theories.
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2020-21 Postdoctoral Fellows
Dalitso RuweDalitso Ruwe is a postdoctoral fellow in the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project at University of Guelph. His post-doc research will focus on the Black Abolitionists debates on American slavery that emerged from the National Negro Conventions of 1830-1864 and the role the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and migration to Canada afforded Black thinkers like Mary Ann Shadd to develop socio-political and legal critiques of American Slavery. Dr. Ruwe received his PhD in Philosophy in 2019 from Texas A&M. Previously, he was a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg University. His research focuses on Africana Political Philosophy with an emphasis on the Intellectual History of Black Racial Sciences, Intellectual History of Black Radical Tradition, Anti-Colonial Theory, and Africana Legal History.
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Simona VucuSimona Vucu is a postdoctoral fellow in the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project at McGill University. Her project with Extending New Narratives will focus on how two medieval women writers, Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) and Christine de Pizan (1364–1430), used their own experiences as women actively engaged in public life to understand human socialization, and how this understanding informed their views on female agency and virtue ethics. Dr. Vucu received her PhD in Philosophy in 2018 from the University of Toronto. She was previously a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, where she worked on medieval discussions of the difference between moral and legal reasoning and the ethical consequences of this distinction for how judges should try the cases before them. Her research is focused mainly on medieval philosophy, especially the intersection of ethics, metaphysics, and legal and political philosophy.
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