The University of St. Michael’s College is pleased to welcome two postdoctoral fellows for 2021-22. Mehmet Cifti joins the College as a Gilson Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow and Dr. Adam Pugen joins as the St. Michael’s College McLuhan Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow.
Mehmet Ciftci is from the small town of Cheltenham in the UK, and previously studied philosophy and politics at the University of Manchester (2015), before studying a PGDip (2016) and MPhil (2018) in theology, specialising in Christian ethics, at the University of Oxford. He will soon complete his PhD at Oxford under the direction of Prof. Joshua Hordern. His dissertation is a study and critique of the Catholic Church’s teachings on church-state relations at the Second Vatican Council. He hopes it will be published in the future as an overpriced monograph. He has written articles for journals, including New Blackfriars and the Scottish Journal of Theology, on various subjects, such as liberation theology, the Qur’an, the critique of political ideologies, and Mariology, although his research interests are mainly in political theology. He has never been to Canada before, but he is reportedly excited to find out what Timbits are.
Adam Pugen is a communication and digital media scholar, who draws on the traditions of medium theory and phenomenology. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. His dissertation, “The Intellective Touch: A Phenomenology of Digital Modernism,” develops a theory of phenomenological aesthetics, which, following the philosopher Edmund Husserl and the media scholar Marshall McLuhan, is meant to function as an “anti-environment” to reveal the psychic and sensory biases engendered by digital media environments. Adam has taught courses on contemporary communication technologies and communication and advertising at the Institute for Communication, Culture, and Information Technology at the University of Toronto. He is a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Digital Life and co-editor of the New Explorations Weblog. He continues to research the foundations of digital media cultures through examining the intersection between contemporary mediated behaviors and the psychological structures pertaining to modes of alphabetic literacy and mechanization.