People

Organizers

Zed Adams

Zed Adams is Associate professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the New School for Social Research.

Email – zed@newschool.edu

Yasuo Deguchi

Yasuo Deguchi is Dean and Professor at the Graduate School of Letters at Kyoto University and Co-chairperson of the Kyoto Institute of Philosophy.

Markus Gabriel

Chair for epistemology, modern and contemporary philosophy. Markus is the director of the International Centre for Philosophy at the University of Bonn, and is also running the Center for Science and Thought.

 Email – philoerk@uni-bonn.de

 

 

Paul Kottmann

Paul A. Kottman is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he is Chair of the Committee on Liberal Studies, and is affiliated with the Philosophy Department. Email – kottmanp@newschool.edu
IPNH 2026
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Christian Coseru

Christian Coseru is Professor of Philosophy at the College of Charleston and currently Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an important voice in the philosophy of mind, with a focus on cross-cultural philosophy incorporating both Western, as well as Indian and Buddhist traditions. Institutionally, this focus is reflected, for example, in his editing of the Springer Series ‚Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures‘, as well as his position as the president of the International Society for Buddhist Philosophy. He is the author of ‚Perceiving Reality: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Cognition in Buddhist Philosophy‘ (2012), and edited the special issue ‚Is Subjectless Consciousness Possible?‘ (2024) of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Recently, he has begun exploring questions regarding artificial intelligence and cognition from this intercultural perspective.

 

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Kristin Andrews

Kristin Andrews is Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Professor of Philosophy at York University. She has written extensively on the philosophy of animal minds, known especially for her work on sociality, normativity and morality in nonhuman animals. Her positions have been published in ‚The Animal Mind‘ (2015) and ‚The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds‘ (2017), representing a significant part of the subdiscipline’s foundation. Most recently, she published ‚How To Study Animal Minds‘ (2020), a discussion of the principles of comparative psychology. Her non-anthropocentric concepts of personhood, sociality and normativity provide theoretical tools not only for the examination of nonhuman animals, but also for artificial agents.

 

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Jenann Ismael

Jenann Ismael is William H. Miller III Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the philosophy of physics and natural philosophy, as well as cognitive science and philosophy of mind, including widely noted works on the philosophy of time and probability. Among other works, she is the author of ‚Time: A Very Short Introduction‘ (2021), ‚How Physics Makes us Free‘ (2016), as well as multiple guest articles in the Times Literary Supplement, contributing to a broad dissemination of philosophical research to a broader public.

 

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Leif Weatherby

Leif Weatherby is Professor of German at New York University, where he is Director of Digital Humanities at NYU and founding director of the Digital Theory Lab. His approach to issues of computation and digital phenomena is shaped by his background in comparative literature and literary theory, positioning him as a leading voice especially in recent debates on the ways in which artificial intelligence does, or does not, use language. His first monograph ‚Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx‘ (2016) proposed a technological metaphysics based on German Romanticism.  His most recent book, ‚Language Machines‘: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism‘ (2025), proposes an analysis of Large Language Models building on 20th century structuralist linguistic theory and semiotics, arguing that the synthesis of language and computation, as two closely connected types of systems of representation, is foundational to recent developments in artificial intelligence. 

 

Julia Kastner

Julia Kastner is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Bonn. She works as a student research assistant at the Center for Science and Thought where she helps with projects such as “Desirable Digitalisation: Rethinking AI for Just and Sustainable Futures” as well as the book series Technosophy. In her research she has been focusing on political philosophy, epistemology and feminist theories. More recently, she has found interest in the conditions of human freedom, focusing on the notion of autonomy at the intersection of philosophy of mind, and theories of human agency.

 

Anna Robers

Anna Robers is a Master’s student in Psychology at the University of Bonn, with a focus on cognitive, differential, social and clinical psychology. She is currently writing her master’s thesis on the early therapeutic alliance and is also interested in the role of artificial intelligence in mental health care and therapeutic practice.

 

Leon Kurp

Leon Joel Ahmad Kurp is currently enrolled at the University of Bonn as a master’s student of Philosophy. Focusing on both political philosophy as well as philosophy of the mind, he wrote his Bachelor’s thesis on the foundational intersectionality of metaphysical, anthropological and political aspects of Baruch de Spinoza’s philosophy. Using this as a basis, his current work is now focusing on French philosophy of the second half of the 20th century, particularly concentrating on Deleuze and Matheron, while simultaneously branching out to other fields of personal interest, such as overall Perso-Arabic medieval philosophy as well as certain thinkers in particular, including Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture.

 

Theodor Avenarius

Theodor Avenarius is currently finishing his Master’s degree in Philosophy at the University of Bonn. His research focuses primarily on German Idealism and Critical Theory, with particular interest in Kant, Hegel, and Marx. He aims to reconcile competing conceptions of ideology into a unified account for contemporary political debates, drawing on Hegel’s conception of truth and his socio-philosophical work.

 

Luca Hector

Luca Hector is a Master’s student in Philosophy at the University of Bonn. His focus lies primarily on philosophy of language, especially politically loaded speech, the functioning of semantically underdetermined expressions, and the impacts of such types of speech on social belief systems. Additionally, he is very interested in questions regarding the structure and characteristics of digital objects, and the ways in which digital technologies appear to allow us genuine construction of (parts of) our environment through formal linguistic/symbolic processes. He is also engaged with themes more clearly situated in the disciplines of formal logic and philosophy of mathematics, both for their own sake and because he deems them foundational to the other mentioned issues.

IPNH 2025

Ned Block (2025 Forum Humanum Lecturer)

Ned Block is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at New York University. A world leading figure in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, he is best known for his influential work on consciousness, mental representation, and the distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness. His research bridges philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, shaping debates about the nature of experience and the limits of scientific explanation. His most recent book, The Border Between Seeing and Thinking (Oxford, 2023), examines how perceptual processes interface with cognition, offering a new framework for understanding the mind’s architecture.

Alva Noë (2025 Forum Humanum Lecturer)

Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a leading figure in the philosophy of perception and analytic phenomenology, known for his extensive and influential work on consciousness. More recently, he has also turned his attention to art and aesthetics, his latest book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are was published by Princeton in 2023. He is currently exploring the relations between love, consciousness and pictoriality, with a focus on what these relations tell us about artificial intelligence.

Birgit Mersmann

Birgit Mersmann is Professor for Contemporary Art and Digital Image Cultures at the University of Bonn. An art historian and image theoretician, her work focuses on global contemporary art, art in the context of technology and electronic media from photography to digital image-generation, and the history and theory of the museum. As well as being an historian and theorist, she has contributed to exhibits on AI art and imagistic representations of migration. Her most recent book is Über die Grenzen des Bildes. Kulturelle Differenz und transkulturelle Dynamik im globalen Feld der Kunst.

Laurie Paul

Laurie Paul is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Yale University. Her work has spanned metaphysics, especially issues in ontology, causation and the nature of time, and topics at the intersection of cognitive science, psychology and moral philosophy. Her highly influential 2014 work Transformative Experience has had a significant impact on thinking about rational choice and decision making across fields including psychology, ethics and economics

Erin Thompson

Erin Thompson is a professor in the Department of Art and Music at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York). A lawyer and art historian, her work focuses on the intersection of art and crime, investigating phenomena such as looting, forgery, art theft and iconoclasm. Her most recent book is Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments (Norton 2022). Besides her academic work and frequent contributions to the media, she is also the curator of several exhibits, including “The Missing: Rebuilding the Past” at the Andrew and Anya Shiva Gallery, John Jay College, and “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo” at the President’s Gallery, John Jay College.

Gregory Bartels

Gregory Bartels is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and an Adjunct Lecturer at Hunter College, City University of New York. His research explores Hegel and the tradition of German Idealism, with a particular focus on the philosophy of time and its implications for metaphysics. He has taught courses on Schopenhauer, metaphysics, and the philosophy of time, and his work engages broader questions in 19th-century philosophy. His current project examines how conceptions of temporality shape philosophical accounts of knowledge, freedom, and historical change.

Hsun-Mei Chen

Hsun-Mei Chen is currently completing a PhD dissertation at Kyoto University. After earning a BS in pharmacy, he worked part-time as a pharmacist while completing an MA in philosophy at National Taiwan University. The master’s thesis examined thought insertion—a symptom of schizophrenia—from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy. His current research investigates silence in East Asian Buddhist philosophy, seeking to clarify distinct philosophical models of silence within East Asian contexts. While specializing in Buddhist philosophy, he remains broadly interested in questions across other areas of philosophy.

Nick Dreikausen

Nick Dreikausen is currently completing his master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Bonn. He works as a student research assistant at the Chair of Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Bonn. His research interests include current debates in (meta-) metaphysics, (meta-) ontology, social ontology and applied epistemology. Recently, he has been focusing on the interface between social ontology, social epistemology and theories of reference.

Akito Funatsu

Akito Funatsu is a master’s student in philosophy at Kyoto University and holds an MD, having completed his initial clinical training at Kyoto University Hospital. His research explores traditional Japanese conceptions of the self, focusing on how the self emerges through rhythmic interactions with the environment mediated by embodied action. Drawing on the thought of Kitarō Nishida, Bin Kimura, and Yasuo Deguchi, he investigates how such a view of the self can illuminate various forms of psychopathology and existential disruption. He is particularly interested in the role of bodily rhythm in shaping the dynamic interplay between self and world.

Abby Merrick

Abby Merrick is currently completing her Master’s degree in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. She works at the intersection of art history and aesthetic philosophy, focusing on the Decadent and Aesthetic movements in 19th century France and Britain. Her research centers on the idea of l’art pour l’art (“art for art’s sake”) and its afterlives. What is art’s “sake”? She is particularly interested in examining the extent to which the works of criticism that first articulated and endorsed l’art pour l’art can be read as coherent philosophies of art which remain relevant today.  Before beginning her graduate studies, Abby worked for over a decade in contemporary art galleries in New York City and organized temporary exhibitions as an independent curator. Although she now spends more time with the dead than the living in her academic pursuits, she occasionally writes critical essays about contemporary visual art and literature.

Miriam Celine Otten

Miriam Celine Otten is a master’s student in Japanology at the University of Bonn. After completing her bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies with a focus on media, she studied at Seikei University in Tokyo. Her research examines the construction and transformation of beauty standards in Japanese media, with particular attention to the impact of AI-generated images, beauty filters, and virtual influencers on cultural notions of aesthetics and representation.

Vidya Ravilochan

Vidya Ravilochan is a PhD student in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research and adjunct instructor at Fordham University. Her dissertation addresses why institutional responses to impending planetary collapse have—per Thunberg—amounted to “blah, blah, blah”: this ecological crisis, Ravilochan argues, stems from liberal capitalism’s systematic misinterpretation of beings as infinitely exploitable resources (Bestand). To construe a tree as lumber affirms it by annihilating it; this perverse logic renders factically finite entities metaphysically infinite, licensing ceaseless extraction. Ravilochan couples immanent critique of liberal capitalist ontology with “methodological mythopoesis” which, following Heraclitus, Plato, and Tolkien, reveals being as fundamentally musical—a dialectical harmony of opposing tensions—thus enabling an epagogic turning-away-to-turn-back-toward and see things anew. What emerges is the groundwork for a new ontology wherein all entities make differentiated ethical demands on us in virtue of what they are, challenging us to recognize the intrinsic moral significance of the more-than-human world.

Masako Sasaki

Masako Sasaki is a Ph.D. student at Kyoto University. Her doctoral research is conducted on what constitutes the ‘goodness’ of linguistic practices. Her interest lies in the relation between the evaluative and rational aspects of language. She explores perception, emotion, value, rationality and language particularly from the perspectives of language-games and phenomenological epistemology.

Victoria Elisabeth Schweer

Victoria Schweer holds a B.Sc. an M.Sc. in Psychology from the University of Bonn. She is a certified systemic coach and occupational health manager, and serves as the managing director of a physiotherapy practice in Bonn. Her work follows a preventive and holistic approach, integrating diverse therapeutic methods to provide the best possible individualized treatment. She is particularly interested in combining person-centered therapies with AI-supported training and methodologies to promote sustainable therapeutic outcomes and address the shortage of qualified therapists.

Anaïs Siebers

Anaïs Siebers is currently pursuing her PhD in Philosophy on “Agency in the Digital Lifeworld” at the University of Bonn. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with a focus on human–machine interaction. Initially, her work centered on the technological aspects of knowledge representation, human–machine interaction, and artificial intelligence. She then completed an interdisciplinary master’s degree in Cognitive Science, allowing her to explore her research interests from a more human-centered perspective.

Marlene Sieverdingbeck

Marlene Sieverdingbeck is a Master’s student of Philosophy at the University of Bonn, and works at the International Centre of Philosophy NRW. In their B.A. thesis, they focused on a theoretical reconceptualization of sexual consent in response to the shortcomings of conventional consent frameworks suggested by liberal and radical feminist scholars, particularly exploring the ontology of consent and incorporating a more nuanced understanding of sexual autonomy and intersectional power dynamics. Besides Analytical Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality, their main research interests include Social Ontology and Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, and Philosophy of Science and Technology.

Janin Tscheschel

Janin Tscheschel works as a research associate and lecturer at the Department of Media Studies, University of Bonn. She holds an interdisciplinary and international academic background, having completed a binational BA in Franco-German Studies in Paris and Bonn and a trinational MA in European Film and Media Studies in Weimar, Lyon, and Utrecht. Her PhD project examines how mental illness is discursively constructed in documentary film. Focusing on the medium’s potential to shape and reflect public understandings of mental illness, she explores how documentaries attempt to develop audiovisual forms capable of representing inner states. In addition, her research investigates how artificial intelligence might expand these representational possibilities and how AI can be used at the intersection of media studies and psychology in therapeutic contexts.

Charlotte Wolf

Marie Charlotte Wolf holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Bonn and is currently enrolled in the respective master’s program. She is working as a research assistant at the chair for epistemology, modern and contemporary philosophy. Her current work focuses on Echo-Chambers and bad epistemic social structures. Besides social epistemology, her research interests include feminist theory, social ontology, and philosophy of science.

Past Keynote Speakers

Micheal W. Clune

Yasuo Deguchi (2024 Forum Humanum Lecturer)

Yasuo Deguchi is Dean and Professor at the Graduate School of Letters at Kyoto University and Co-chairperson of the Kyoto Institute of Philosophy.

Daniel Kehlmann

Jocelyn Maclure

Fumi Okiji

Cameron Buckner

Cameron Buckner is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston with a background in computer science and artificial intelligence. In his current work, he focuses on the relationship between learning and meaning, arguing that the failure to take learning seriously has impeded research in a number of areas including the philosophy or representation, comparative psychology, and computer science.

David Chalmers (2023 Forum Humanum Lecturer)

David Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU. Chalmers is also Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University and co-director of the PhilPapers Foundation. His interests include the philosophy of mind (especially consciousness) and the foundations of cognitive science, physics, and technology, as well as the philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology, and many other areas. His published works include the books The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, 1996. The Character of Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2010. Constructing the World. Oxford University Press, 2012. Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. W. W. Norton, 2022.

Kanta Dihal

Kanta Dihal is Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London and Associate Fellow of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. In her research, she focuses on the stories we tell about science and technology across cultures, and how they help us think about ethics and bias in new technologies. She is co-editor of the books AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines (Oxford University Press, 2023) and has co-authored a series of papers on AI narratives with Dr Stephen Cave, including ‘The Whiteness of AI’ (Philosophy and Technology, 2020). She is currently writing the book Stories in Superposition.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the emeritus Albert Guérard Professor in Literature and emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature and of French and Italian at Stanford University. One of the world’s most renowned literary theorists, he has made notable contributions to our understandings of national literatures in Romance and Germanic languages, the methodology of literary criticism and analysis, and the nature of contemporary aesthetic experience. He has written several hundred publications, which have been translated into over twenty languages.

Nandi Theunissen

Nandi Theunissen is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. She works on foundational topics in ethics with a focus on the nature of value, including the value of humanity. She is currently thinking about excellence, the well-lived life, and our relationship to ourselves.

Kalindi Vora

Kalindi Vora is Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her work takes up questions of technology, colonialism and raced and gendered labor under globalization. Her current book project, supported by a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Studies award (2022-2024) is tentatively titled, Autoimmune: Chronic Conditions and Care in a Time of Uncertain Medicine. It places contemporary narratives of illness by patients facing racism and sexism in their daily lives within an analysis of the history of the concept of autoimmunity and contemporary practices of healthcare self-monitoring to understand the potential for patient-physician co-production of medical knowledge.

Homi K. Bhabha

Homi K. Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University. A leading scholar of literature and postcolonial theorist, his work focuses on cultural change and power, and cosmopolitanism. His highly influential work, which has been translated into multiple languages, includes The Location of Culture (2004, Routledge Classics), Framing Fanon (2005), and Beyond Photography (2011).

Agnes Callard

Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, focusing primarily on ethics and ancient philosophy. Alongside a variety of articles, her publications include Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018, Oxford) and the widely celebrated On Anger (2020, MIT Press). She is also known for her strong commitment to public engagement on behalf of philosophy, having published in the Boston Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times amongst several other forums.

Elisabeth Camp

Elisabeth Camp is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, having previously been a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows and Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her focus is on forms of thought and talk that don’t fit the standard philosophical model of mind and language. Amongst her many articles are “Sarcasm, Pretense, and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction,” Noûs 46:4 (December 2012) and “Putting Thoughts to Work: Concepts, Systematicity, and Stimulus-Independence,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78:2. She has also been involved in designing and implementing programs for GED instruction in public housing and for ESL instruction in the Latino community, working especially with the Chicago Public Library and Universidad Popular.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the emeritus Albert Guérard Professor in Literature and emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature and of French and Italian at Stanford University. One of the world’s most renowned literary theorists, he has made notable contributions to our understandings of national literatures in Romance and Germanic languages, the methodology of literary criticism and analysis, and the nature of contemporary aesthetic experience. He has written several hundred publications, which have been translated into over twenty languages.

Joel Snyder

Joel Snyder is a Professor of Art History in the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities, the Committee on the Visual Arts, and the College at the University of Chicago. His interests include the history of photography, theory of photography and film; history and theory of perspective, Medieval and Renaissance theory of vision; critical theory, aesthetics and the theory of representation. He is Co-Editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. His many publications include His books include: Gentlemen Photographers: the Work of Loring Underwood and Wm. Lyman Underwood (Solio Foundation, 1987), American Frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan, 1867-1874 (Aperture, 1981), and The Documentary Photograph as a Work of Art: American Photographs, 1860-1876 (David and Alfred Smart Gallery, 1976).

Kalindi Vora

Kalindi Vora is Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her work takes up questions of technology, colonialism and raced and gendered labor under globalization. Her current book project, supported by a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Studies award (2022-2024) is tentatively titled, Autoimmune: Chronic Conditions and Care in a Time of Uncertain Medicine. It places contemporary narratives of illness by patients facing racism and sexism in their daily lives within an analysis of the history of the concept of autoimmunity and contemporary practices of healthcare self-monitoring to understand the potential for patient-physician co-production of medical knowledge.

Bayo Akomolafe

Bayo Akomolafe is an acclaimed speaker, essayist, public intellectual educator. He has taught at several universities across the globe and in 2014 was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He is the author of the books These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak.

Alice Crary

Alice Crary is University Distinguished Professor, Philosophy, The New School for Social Research. She is a well-known for her writings on moral thought and critical theory, for investigations of the ethical representations of humans and animals, and as a scholar of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. She has held visiting appointments at several prestigious institutions, and her latest book is Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought (Harvard University Press, 2016).

Lorraine Daston

Lorraine Daston is a world-renowned historian and philosopher of science. She is Director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She has published numerous books on a range of topics, including the history of probability and statistics, the emergence of the scientific fact, scientific models, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity. Her most recent book, Against Nature, explores the human tendency to see moral meaning in nature.

Monika Kaup

Monika Kaup is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Washington. Her research interests span hemispheric American and borderlands literature, the baroque/neobaroque/New World baroque, Latin American literature and critical theory. She is the author of Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative (New York: Peter Lang, 2001) and Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (University of Virginia Press, 2012) amongst other works. Her latest book is New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory is published in the “Speculative Realism” series of Edinburgh University Press.

Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore is David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and staff writer at the New Yorker. She is a leading expert on American history, law and politics, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Affairs and numerous other publications. The author of many award-winning books, including the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States, her latest book is IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, which has been longlisted for the National Book Award.

Stuart Russell

Stuart Russell is Professor of Computer Science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and the founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI). The recipient of numerous awards, Professor Russell is one of the most renowned figures in contemporary computer science and AI research, and his Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach has since become one of the standard textbooks on artificial intelligence.

Jessica Riskin

 Jessica Riskin is Professor of History at Stanford University. She received her PhD from Berkley and her AB from Harvard. She has also taught at MIT and Sciences Po, Paris. She is the author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago 2016) and Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago 2002). 

Susan Schneider

Susan Schneider is a leading philosopher of mind, cognitive scientist and public intellectual. Amongst several other appointments, she holds the NASA-Baruch Blumberg Chair at Library of Congress and NASA and is Pofessor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut. Her most recent book is the hugely acclaimed Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind.

Jens Schröter

Jens Schröter is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Bonn since 2015, having previously been the director of the DFG Research Training Group ‘Locating Media’ in Siegen. A leading media theorist, his areas of specialization include the history and theory of digital media and photography, intermediality and the interaction of media studies and value theory. Amongst his many books and publications are 3D. History, Theory and Aesthetics of the Technical-transplane Image and Verdrahtet. The Wire und der Kampf um die Medien.

Brian Cantwell Smith

Brian Cantwell Smith is the Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human at the University of Toronto. He received his BS, MS and PhD degrees from MIT. He has also taught at Stanford, Indiana, and Duke. He is the author of The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment (MIT 2019) and On the Origin of Objects (MIT 1996).

Nell Watson

Eleanor “Nell” Watson is a Machine Intelligence engineer and faculty at the Singularity University. A pioneer of Deep Machine Vision, she is also a prominent voice on the ethics and politics of AI technology, serving multiple advisory roles and holding multiple fellowships. Amongst her many roles, she serves as Chair of the IEEE’s ECPAIS Transparency Experts Focus Group and Vice-Chair of the P7001 Transparency of Autonomous Systems committee on AI Ethics & Safety, which is dedicated to safeguarding algorithmic trust.

Past Forum Humanum Fellowship Holders

Alisa Maria Hastedt

José Miguel Angel Gálvez Huamán

José Gálvez is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Augsburg (Germany). From 2019 to 2025, he worked as a research assistant in the Department of Musicology/Sound Studies at the University of Bonn. His research combines archival work, media archaeology and conceptual analysis. Gálvez contributes to developing an interface between the humanities and STEM disciplines to examine the material, techno-epistemological, infrastructural and globally hegemonic foundations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century auditory cultures, moving beyond the “old” humanistic fixation on ideas, meaning, identity, and representation.

Milena Jessen

Milena Jessen is a PhD student in economics at the University of Bonn. Her research lies in behavioral and experimental economics, with a focus on the cognitive foundations of decision-making. She studies how people mentally represent their environment and how these representations shape behavior.

Caroline Jüngermann

Alissa Kautz

Alissa Kautz is a doctoral researcher at Lund University in Sweden. She holds two master’s degrees from the University of Bonn, one in English Literatures and Cultures as well as one in Dependency and Slavery Studies. Her theses ranged from analysing arboreal agencies in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to a cultural-historical investigation of epistemic and ecological extractivisms of human ethnological expositions. Her doctoral research aims to understand how contemporary environmental nonfiction can question culturally dominant narratives of anthropocentrism.

Dalia N. Obidat

Dalia Obidat is a research associate and doctoral researcher in Religious Studies and Digital Humanities at the University of Bonn, and a researcher affiliated with the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft (FIW). Her PhD project explores how Arab atheists and ex-Muslims navigate sexuality, belief, and identity in digital spaces. Drawing on feminist theory, queer studies, and digital ethnography, her work examines how desire, agency, and secularism are negotiated across online platforms in the Middle East and North Africa.

José Renato Laranjeira de Pereira

Jerôme Schickschneit

Jerôme Schickschneit is completing a Master’s degree in Philosophy at the University of Bonn, having previously earned a Bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Cologne University of Applied Sciences. He has studied philosophy, sociology, and political science at several universities in Germany and the Netherlands and worked as a Research Assistant at the International Centre of Philosophy (IZPH) and the Institute for Science and Ethics (IWE). His Master’s thesis explores the affective conditions of active ignorance, a topic he plans to expand into a PhD on institutionalised ignorance and structural apathy. Beyond academia, he is also an experienced freelance artist in dance, performance, and electronic music.

Jonas Arruda

Jonas Arruda is a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Unit Mathematics and Life Science at the University of Bonn. He holds a Master’s degree in Mathematics and Economics, and Bachelor’s minor in Philosophy. Jonas is currently pursuing his PhD in Computational Biology and focusses on the development of AI tools for understanding biological dynamic systems with applications in medicine. In this interdisciplinary context, Jonas is interested on the impact of AI on both individuals and society at large, offering a different perspective on the interface between technology and society. 

Ruth Dorothea Eggel

Ruth Dorothea Eggel is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching and research assistant at the Department of Cultural Studies & Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bonn. Her dissertation “Embodying Gaming” explores the semiotic-material dimension and actualizations of the digital through embodied enactments at video game events. She is a member of the STS research collective RUSTLab, the Digital Anthropology Lab and the Code Ethnography Collective. Her research interests include Digital Anthropology, (Feminist) Science and Technology Studies, Games Studies, Ethnographic & Praxeographic Methods.

Debora Eller

Debora Eller is currently completing her master’s degree in sociology at the University of Bonn. Her research interests include critical theory, psychoanalytically oriented social psychology and political philosophy. She is currently working on a feminist reinterpretation of the insights of the early Frankfurt School in order to contribute to the formulation of a new feminist theory. Her theoretical perspective is based on the intertwining of social and subject structure, which is why she combines psychoanalytical approaches with a critical social theory. That is why she is currently working on co-editing an anthology that develops a feminist theory with regard to the gendered dimension of the constitution of the subject. Her theoretical work also deals with the processes of male subject formation, for example in her recently submitted manuscript “The subject in the bourgeois public – masculinity dilemma and the provincial spirit as a cause of domestic violence “. She has also written articles or essays on the topics of sexual violence and the critique of anti-Semitism and post-feminism and organized several extramural conferences on topics such as the culture of remembrance, ideologies and their critique and the topicality of critical theory.

Lea Klingberg

Lea Klingberg works as a research associate and lecturer at the Department of Media Studies, University of Bonn. In her PhD project, she focuses on how the compulsion of capitalist production to replace human labor in the production process drives the development and deployment of artificial intelligence today. As part of this project, she investigates the imaginaries tied to automation, the tensions arising from the increasing use of the technology unfolding at the non-economic background of production, and their consequences for the working class.

Valentin Ris

Valentin Ris is a PhD candidate in Musicology / Sound Studies at the University of Bonn. His project examines the history of the music production in digital software environments. His fields of interest are sound studies, media studies and the history of knowledge. Since autumn 2021, he has been a member of the Structured Doctoral Program of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Bonn and, from November 2022, a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation. Previously, he studied musicology and German studies in Bonn, Cologne and Cardiff until 2020.

Evangelia Siopi

Evangelia Siopi is an MA student at the University of Bonn and works as a research assistant at the Chair of Natural Philosophy and Philosophy of Science. Her Master’s thesis focuses on the Husserlian notion of intersubjectivity as a condition of possibility of objectivity. Her primary research interests are phenomenology and philosophy of language, in each case both historically and systematically.

Carla Spielmann

Carla Spielmann completed her master’s degree in Philosophy last year and is currently completing her second Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Sociology. She will start her PhD in Philosophy this year. She works as a research assistant at the Chair for Social Ethics at the University of Bonn. Her main research interests are epistemology, philosophy of mind, and German Idealism.

Inga Triebel

Inga Triebel graduated from the University of Bonn with two BA degrees, one in Philosophy, the other in Latin American Studies, and is currently a Master´s student at Leiden University in Global and Comparative Philosophy and Latin American Studies. Their research interests include intercultural philosophy, the relationship between cultural production and social contexts, and feminist epistemologies as a critical reflection on the relationality of knowledge, subjects and embodiment.

Larissa Bolte

Larissa Bolte is a PhD student at the University of Bonn and works as a research assistant at the Institute for Science and Ethics as part of the Sustainable AI Lab. Her dissertation focusses on the conceptual foundations of sustainability, investigating how these can inform AI ethics. Her main research interests are in metaethics, normative foundations, and ethics of technology.

Lena Marie Brinkmann

Lena Marie Brinkmann works as a research assistant at the Research Training Group 2291: Present / Literature at the University of Bonn. Her doctoral project deals with the renaissance of the village story genre. Following on from the 19th century, the inn also forms a central site of local community and narrative in current contemporary literature. Her research interests include spatial theory, intermediality, and realism.

Soo Min Kim

Soo Min Kim is Ph.D student and research assistant at the Chair of Public Law (Prof. Dr. Gärditz) at the University of Bonn. In her doctoral studies she reflects how German Public Law operates with – in particular scientific – facts. Based on the understanding that facts are social constructs, the dissertation aims to propound a suitable concept for the legal system in terms of investigation, selection, application and control of facts.

Julia Mierbach

Julia Mierbach is a PhD student and research assistant at the University of Bonn and the Competence Center for Cybersecurity in North-Rhine Westphalia. Her dissertation explores the history of figurative seriality since the 17th century. Her research interests include cross-relationships between (digital) technologies, aesthetics and literature and their effects on society and economy.

Scott Robbins

Scott Robbins is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Science and Thought at the University of Bonn. He received his PhD in the ethics of artificial intelligence at the University of Delft in the Netherlands. Scott’s research has focused on the opacity of machine learning algorithms and the implications this has for humans retaining meaningful human control over them. He has publications in Minds and Machines, Science and Engineering Ethics, and, AI & Society. Scott is also a founding member of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics.

Antonetta Stephany

Antonetta Stephany is studying for a PhD in law at the University of Bonn and works as a research assistant in the research project “Restatement of Restitution Rules for Nazi-Confiscated Art”. Her dissertation focuses on procedural aspects regarding the restitution of Nazi Looted Art.

Victor Weisbrod

Victor Weisbrod is a Ph.D. student at the University of Bonn. His dissertation aims to reconstruct Adorno’s negative dialectics as a systematic project to transform metaphysics from a form of theory that claims thought and being are structurally identical to one that investigates the gaps and tensions between them. His main research interests are (post-)Kantian philosophy, critical theory, and contemporary (meta-)metaphysics.

Max Alt

Max Alt is research assistant in Musicology/Sound Studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Bonn. A trained audio engineer, he studied Musicology and Cultural Studies at the Humboldt-University Berlin and the University of Copenhagen. His current project (PhD) covers the discourses around the datafication of music listening and personalized listening technologies.

Dana Bönisch

Dana Bönisch is a staff member of the Comparative Literature department, University of Bonn. Her postdoc project explores entanglements of literature and physics, as well as the figure of entanglement itself. Her research interests include visual theory and the relationship between fiction and ethics.

Natalie Diederichs

Natalie Dederichs is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bonn, where she also works as a research assistant at the RTG 2291: Gegenwart / Literatur. Her thesis discusses the affective agency of (uncanny) literary atmospheres in contemporary ecofiction. Her research interests include material ecocriticism, theories of reading, post- and transhumanist discourse, and anglophone literatures and cultures of the 20th and 21st century.

Sonja Dobkowitz

Sonja Dobkowitz is a PhD candidate at the Bonn Graduate School of Economics and a member of the Research Training Group 2281 The Macroeconomics of Inequality. Besides her PhD, she studies Philosophy and History Studies at the University of Bonn intending to integrate philosophical considerations into her economic research. Her work focuses primarily on the meaning of inequality for the individual and its effects on aggregate outcomes.

Christoph Ernst

Christoph Ernst, PD Dr., is a research associate within the project “Van Gogh TV. Multimedia Documentation and Analysis of their Legacy” (Prof. Anja Stöffler & Prof. Dr. Jens Schröter) funded by the German Reserach Foundation (DFG) at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Bonn. His main research interests include diagrammatic reasoning & media aesthetics of information visualization; theories of tacit knowledge & digital media, esp. interface theory and artificial intelligence; media theory & media philosophy, esp. media and imagination.

Esther Gardei

Esther_gardei

Esther Gardei is a PhD student at the University of Bonn and works as a research assistant in the interdisciplinary and intercultural reconciliation project at the University of Bonn. Her main research interests are sociology of knowledge, the relationship of thought and context, biographical studies, memory studies and antisemitism. Her dissertation focuses on the history of German Jewry in Palestine/Israel.