Biography
Noga Arikha is a philosopher, essayist, and historian of ideas. After a PhD at the Warburg Institute, London (2001), she was an "Art and Neuroscience" Fellow at the Italian Academy at Columbia, NY, taught at Bard College and the Bard Graduate Center (NY), and was Chair of Liberal Arts at Parsons in Paris / PCA (Paris). She now works across the disciplines as a "science humanist", fostering dialogues between neuroscientists, psychologists, clinicians, social scientists, humanists and artists in order to investigate our embodied selves. She is Associate Fellow of the Warburg Institute, Honorary Fellow of the Center for the Politics of Feelings (London), and Research Associate at the Institut Jean Nicod, ENS (Paris).
Her latest book, The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind, an exploration of brain & body, self & dementia, medicine & psychiatry based on neuropsychiatric patients, was published by Basic Books (UK & US) in 2022 (paperback 2023). Her first, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (Ecco / HarperCollins, 2007), was a New York Times Review Editor’s Choice and a Washington Post Best Non-Fiction Book for 2007. She is currently writing a biography of anthropologist Franz Boas. Her essays have appeared in Liberties Journal, The European Review of Books, The White Review, Aeon / Psyche, Psychology Today, Lapham's Quarterly, Politico, Edge, amongst others.
During her time as Visiting Fellow at the STG, she will develop much needed synergies between research in cognitive psychology and affective neuroscience, the study of social emotions within the social sciences, and political deliberation of the sort that will inform the Democratic Odyssey project. The long-term plan is to bring to bear insights from these multi-pronged studies of embodied, intersubjective emotions to the realm of social interactions, using also artistic explorations of shared spaces – with the aim of understanding better, and thereby acting upon our political passions.