Post-doctoral Fellows

Emil Andersson

Emil Andersson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, supervised by Iwao Hirose. His postdoctoral research project, Extending Liberal Legitimacy, is funded by a three-year international postdoc grant from the Swedish Research Council. The project deals with the problem of political legitimacy from a Rawlsian contractualist perspective, and is a continuation of his dissertation Reinterpreting Liberal Legitimacy. It is primarily devoted to exploring previously neglected issues at the intersection of liberal legitimacy and intergenerational ethics.

Emil earned his PhD in practical philosophy from Uppsala University in 2019, under the supervision of Folke Tersman. He is an Associated Researcher in the project Climate Ethics and Future Generations at the Institute for Futures Studies, where he previously held a postdoctoral position. His work has been published in The Journal of Ethics, Theoria, Res Publica, and by Oxford University Press. Postdoc appointment dates: 1 Jan 2022 to 31 Dec 2023.


sujaya.dhanvantari [at] mail.mcgill.ca (Sujaya Dhanvantari) is a SSHRC postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. Her postdoctoral work on the writings of Frantz Fanon (1952-1961) will contribute phenomenological studies, which centre the lived experiences of oppressed peoples from the colonial period to the present, as a way of shedding light on the immense problem of psychic suffering and trauma. In arguing for the importance of Fanon’s critical view of colonial pathologies in the study of contemporary trauma, Dr. Dhanvantari will call for the development of new approaches in philosophy that work toward the recognition of the forms of intergenerational trauma experienced by historically racialized and colonized peoples, in Canada and globally. Dr. Dhanvantari received her PhD in 2020 from Concordia University. Her dissertation studied the existentialist philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, to argue for the development of a new concept of ethics, relevant to the goals of contemporary liberation struggles. Her research is mainly centred on critical race philosophy, decolonial thought, and critical phenomenology. Postdoc appointment dates: 1 Sep 2021 to 31 Aug 2023.


Elena Gordon received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Sydney in 2021. Elena is currently an Extending New Narratives Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University, and she was previously an Anderson Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney. She mainly works on the philosophy of David Hume and has forthcoming work in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy detailing Hume's account of fictions and childhood development. Her research for the Extending New Narratives project examines Catharine Macaulay's (1731-1791) philosophy of education, with a particular focus on the essential role that Macaulay takes non-human animals to have in human moral and epistemic development. Postdoc appointment dates: 28 Nov 2022 to 27 Nov 2023.


fernandapgj [at] gmail.com (Fernanda Pérez-Gay Juárez) is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow, supervised by Ian Gold in the Neurophilosophy Lab. She obtained her PhD in Neuroscience in 2019, supervised by Prof. Stevan Harnad (McGill) and Prof. Victor Frak (UQÀM), funded by CONACYT (Mexican Council for Science and Technology) and an FQRNT Merit Scholarship for Foreign Students. Medical doctor by training, science communicator and interdisciplinary researcher, her interests are at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, the humanities and social sciences. Her work as postdoctoral fellow explores the intersections between social categorization and Theory of Mind: Among her projects are the development of an Ethnically diverse Theory of Mind Face database and an experimental study of the use of narratives to reduce out-group biases and improve cross-cultural social cognition and empathy towards those in stigmatized groups. She is also an active collaborator in projects related to vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy theories and delusions.

Fernanda is also a Course Lecturer at McGill's Psychology department, where she teaches NSCI201 - Introduction to Neuroscience. Her research has been published in journals such as PlosONE, Brain and Cognition and Nature Scientific Reports. As a science communicator, she has published more than 40 articles and participated in podcasts and TV programs for Mexican and Canadian media. In 2019, she wrote, hosted and directed "SINAPSIS: Connections between art and your brain", a series about video art and the brain, which received a FRQS Science Communication grant to be translated and extended to English and French, a project she worked on in 2020, affiliated to the Centre de Recherche en Éthique (CRÉ).

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/fernanda-perez-gay-juarez

Postdoc appointment dates: until 31 May 2024.


hamed.movahedipour [at] mcgill.ca (Hamed Movahedi) is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, under the supervision of Alia Al-Saji at McGill University and Leonard Lawlor at Pennsylvania State University. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Montreal in 2023. His supervisors were Christian Leduc (UdeM) and Daniel W. Smith (Purdue University). His PhD project was called “Continuity and Event in Leibniz and Deleuze,” in which he attempted to reconstruct a Deleuzian theory of continuity, through Leibniz’s Baroque philosophy and mathematics. His postdoctoral research engages with the works of Deleuze, Foucault, and Bergson, with two aims: First, to analyze the structural and conceptual correspondence between Foucault’s implicit metaphysical system and Deleuze’s explicit metaphysics, exposed in his magnum opus, Différence et répétition. Second, to explore a potential conceptual connection between the concept of outside (in Deleuze, Foucault, Blanchot) and Bergson’s notion of duration.

His work has appeared (or is going to appear) in Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Dialogue, and Axiomathes. He has also translated Deleuze’s seminars on Spinoza into Persian.

Postdoc appointment dates: 1 Oct 2023 to 30 Sep 2025

Website: https://mcgill.academia.edu/HamedMovahedi

Email: hamed.movahedipour [at] mcgill.ca


zoey.a.lavallee [at] gmail.com (Zoey Lavallee) is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University. Beginning in 2024, they will be a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre de recherche en éthique where they will be affiliated with McGill University and supervised by Ian Gold and Luc Faucher. Zoey works in philosophy of psychiatry and philosophy of mind, as these intersect with ethics, feminist philosophy, and social epistemology. Their research primarily takes up questions concerning agency, emotion, desire, and self-understanding in the context of psychiatry and mental health, with a special focus on addiction. Zoey completed their Ph.D at The Graduate Center, CUNY, under the supervision of David Papineau.

Email: zoey.a.lavallee [at] gmail.com

Website: www.zoeylavallee.com


nicholas.clanchy [at] pmb.ox.ac.uk (Nick Clanchy) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Canada Research Chair on Epistemic Injustice and Agency and at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique. Their research project, co-supervised by Amandine Catala (UQÀM) and Kristin Voigt (McGill), centres on hermeneutical injustice: roughly, the sort of injustice a person suffers when they are unfairly hindered from satisfying an interest they have in something about them being intelligible to someone. Previous work in this area has focused on how best to enable people to satisfy such interests; a primary aim of the project is to argue for the desirability of instead doing away with at least some such interests, for instance by implementing a universal basic income. To this end the project will draw on work in trans studies, queer theory, and disability studies in addition to feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics.

Before coming to Montréal, Nick studied for a DPhil in philosophy at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Amia Srinivasan and Rachel Fraser. Prior to that, they took a BA and then an MPhil in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. One chapter of their doctoral thesis has recently been published in Episteme as “Whose Hermeneutical Marginalization?”, while another is forthcoming in Hypatia as “Tackling Hermeneutical Injustices in Gender-Affirming Healthcare.”

Postdoctoral appointment dates: 15 Oct 2023 to 14 Oct 2025.

Website: www.nickclanchy.com


Olusegun Samuel is a FRQNT Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University (supervised by Kristin Voigt). Before joining McGill, Olusegun was a Research Scholar at the Centre for Research in Ethics and the Group for Research in Environmental and Animal Ethics at the University of Montreal (Canada), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tuebingen (Germany), and a University Tutor at the University of New South Wales (Australia). At McGill, Olusegun is researching how environmental concerns should be integrated into theories of justice and the place of indigenous perspectives in sustainability knowledge production. Olusegun's research will focus on the themes of conservation, sustainability, epistemic justice, and decolonization, which are primarily anchored on Ubuntu-inspired philosophical traditions. Olusegun believes this will allow for critical input and substantial participation by non-Western philosophical traditions in addressing international environmental concerns.

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