Photo by Kimberly Ho

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Grenoble Alpes. I’m a fellow at the Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation, affiliated with the Centre for Philosophy of Memory and the Performance Lab. I work in empirically-informed philosophy of mind. My current project examines collective and personal memories in cultural bereavement, grief at being culturally uprooted and losing one’s home country.

I completed my PhD in philosophy from the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Prof. Evan Thompson. My doctoral dissertation is on transformative experience, specifically transformative experiences that we do not choose to undergo such as grief, accident, and illness. In my dissertation, I give a descriptive phenomenological account of grief and other unchosen transformative experiences as involving a disruption to and reorganization of organized systems of practical meaning.

In addition to articles on transformative experience, I have published on the cognitive science and philosophy of attention, including on affect-biased attention, hypnosis, and meditative states.

I am also an artist. My practice takes the forms of writing, collaborative research, and performance art. I was a founding member of the performance collective CUERPO, led by Guadalupe Martinez.

Jelena Markovic

care for me