PhD Thesis
Title: Critical History of Biosemiotics and Zoosemiotics: When Animals Talked
PhD supervisor: Carolyn Biltoft
Expected completion date: 2025
My research aims at providing a critical history of biosemiotics and zoosemiotics, thus casting light on the way these ambitious multi/interdisciplinary fields emerged in the 1960s. Biosemiotics is interested in the meaning of communication both between and within organisms. It postulates that the phenomenon of life itself is fundamentally grounded in semiotic processes. This research seeks to illuminate how the field adapted, reacted and interacted with and within other fields, set of theories and political events, such as the birth of ethology, the heyday of psychoanalysis, parapsychology and sociobiology controversies, the cognitive revolution moment, environmental hermeneutics and neuroethics.
Profile
Completing three masters in four different universities enabled me to pursue my dream research focusing on animal behaviors and the history of consciousness at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Previously, I was Interested among others in algorithmic ethics (lecturer at the World Bioethics Conference in 2020 for instance) and environmental ethics (lecturer at the PGBC in 2019). Being trained as a historian, political scientist and bioethicist, I am thrill to investigate the history of biopolitics. Specialization and multidisciplinarity far from being an antinomy should go hand in hand.
Academic Work experience
Teaching Experience
Scientific Assistant at Pierre du Bois Foundation (2022-present)
Researcher at Edgelands Institute (2022)
Teaching Assistant at The Graduate Institute Geneva (2021)
Teacher in Ethics and Pedagogy at HES-SO (2019)
Research Interests
- Ethology
- Animal History
- History of Values
- Posthumanism
- Ethics
- History of Consciousness
- Literature
Fellowships, Grants and Awards
- Grant Fondation Victor&Hélène Barbour (2015) - Excellence Grant The Graduate Institute Geneva (2021)
- Travel Funding: Postgraduate Bioethics Conference (2019)