Postdoctoral Fellows
Dr Iulia Calma | Research Assistant in the European Research Council
Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Dragos Calma
Project: NeoplAT: Neoplatonism and Abrahamic Traditions.
Iulia Calma is an Archivist-Paleographer of the École nationale des chartes, Paris (2013-2018). Her thesis is entitled "The Quodlibetal Questions in the Universities of Prague and Erfurt. A Case Study: the Eucharistic Controversies and the Importance of the Treatise 'Liber de causes. Her interest in the treatise 'Liber de causis' began in 2011, when she joined an international research project directed by Dr Dragos Calma that focused on unpublished Latin commentaries (13th - 14th centuries). From 2011 to 2015 she edited and published three new commentaries on the 'Liber de causis', each of them accompanied by a study of the historical context and the doctrine. Moreover, in her thesis for the École des chartes she edited twelve unknown 15th-century texts (questiones disputate) composed in Hussite Bohemia between 1400 and 1417.
iulia.calma@ucd.ie
Dr Graham Clay | Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow
Principal Investigator: Assistant Professor Ruth Boeker
Project: Hume on the Power of Philosophy
Graham Clay is a recipient of a two-year Government of Ireland fellowship through the Irish Research Council at the UCD School of Philosophy specialising in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics, with a special focus on David Hume and other figures in the early modern period.
Graham's fellowship project at UCD is dedicated to developing an interpretation of Hume's account of the stable beliefs, unstable representations, and affective motivational states (i) that we form in response to philosophical claims and arguments and (ii) that can cause us to act.
He aims to extract insights from this interpretative work for empirical evaluation, both theoretical (e.g., evaluating synergies with existing psychological frameworks) and experimental (e.g., evaluating viability as an explanation of experimental results).
graham.clay@ucd.ie
Dr Patrick Dawson | Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow
Principal Investigator: Assistant Professor Daniel Esmonde-Deasy
Project: Temporal Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science
Patrick Dawson is the recipient of a two-year IRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, working on temporal metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Patrick's current work focuses on the theory of presentism, particularly with reference to modern physics, an area that was also a focus of his recently completed PhD at the University of Sydney. This project aims to publish a book that defends a strong view of presentism, wherein there is not only no existing past or future, but there are also no underlying truths about the past or future. Originally from New Zealand, Patrick took a round-about route to get to Ireland, and to get to philosophy: his early research work (and first academic publication) was in the field of economics, while his Masters degree was in particle physics, completed at the University of Melbourne.
patrick.dawson@ucd.ie
Dr Sophie Keeling | Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow
Principal Investigator: Professor Rowland Stout
Project: Controlling Our Reasons
Sophie Keeling is an IRC fellow at the UCD School of Philosophy and she previously worked at the University of Barcelona (with LOGOS) as a Juan de la Cierva fellow, and at the University of Edinburgh, first as a teaching fellow and then as a researcher (funded by an Analysis studentship). Sophie completed her PhD at the University of Southampton (2014-18).
Sophie's main interests include the philosophy of mind, epistemology, normativity and the philosophy of psychology. More specifically, it centres around why we act the way we act and think the way we do and one kind of explanation in particular. Suppose I visit the shop because I’ve run out of snacks or believe it will rain because the weather forecast says that it will. Or more weightily, perhaps I believe that a political party is the best because of certain policies and votes accordingly. These are the reasons for which we believe and act, and are at the heart of rationality, responsibility, and agency.
sophie.keeling@ucd.ie
Dr Evan King | European Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow
Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Dragos Calma
Project: NeoplAT: Neoplatonism and Abrahamic Traditions.
After receiving a BA in Classics (2010), Evan completed his MA in Classics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, in 2012, writing a thesis on the metaphysics of the transcendentals in Meister Eckhart. In 2017, he graduated with a PhD in Divinity at Clare College, Cambridge (UK), with a dissertation on the sources, motivations, and coherence of the Exposition on the Elements of Theology of Proclus by Berthold of Moosburg. From 2016-2017, he was an Affiliated Lecturer in Divinity at Cambridge and from 2017-2019 he has taught as Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at the University of King's College and in Classics and Religious Studies at Dalhousie. Within the ERC-funded NeoplAT project, he will focus on the sources and reception of Berthold of Moosburg's Exposition.
evan.king@ucd.ie
Dr Dervla MacManus| Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow
Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Katherine O'Donnell
Project: Gender Equity in Irish Architecture
Dervla MacManus is an IRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy working on gender equity in the Irish architecture profession. This project is funded by the Irish Research Council with the RIAI and is looking at why women leave architecture, the gender breakdown in the profession, and attitudes towards gender equity in architecture. As a (former) architect she is concerned with traversing the boundaries between the history and practice of architecture.
Dervla's current research interests include the relationship between architectural representation and experience – especially in photography, architectural pedagogy, gender and feminism in teaching and practice, and the role architecture and its methods can play in restorative justice. She is a member of the Open Heart City collective of academics concerned with the legacy of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.
dervla.macmanus@ucd.ie
Dr Francesco Quatrini | Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow
Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Katherine O'Donnell
Project: Early Modern Women and Religious Dissent: The Collegiants and the Advent of Modernity
Francesco Quatrini is a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCD School of Philosophy. His project focuses on the history of a seventeenth-century Dutch dissenting group called the Collegiants, the history of women among them, and their contribution to the rise of the public sphere and to the development of Enlightenment political values. Francesco has previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Università degli Studi di Napoli l’Orientale, as a fixed-term lecturer at the Faculteit Religie en Theologie, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and as Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast.
Francesco has published widely on the topic of early modern religious dissent and the development of political concepts.
francesco.quatrini@ucd.ie