Polina Lukicheva has been a research fellow at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) since 2014. She is leading the project Apprehending the World Through Relational Structures: Historical Evidence and Contemporary Approaches.
Lukicheva studied sinology, art history and philosophy in Moscow, Berlin and Shanghai. In 2020 she earned a PhD with high honors from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Zurich. She has been working in the domains of comparative epistemology and history of knowledge, theory of concepts and representation, and Buddhist theories of consciousness and visuality. Lukicheva worked on these topics in the research clusters Asia and Europe (University of Zurich) and Iconic Criticism (eikones, University of Basel). She is a recipient of several research grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the University of Zurich.
In her research, Lukicheva addresses the issues of human cognition, as reflected in the Chinese Buddhist sources and in other sources on epistemology, concept and image formation. Her Apprehending the World research project is investigating and reconstructing non-object-centered models of perception and cognition, seeking to demonstrate the feasibility of these models for explication of some universal properties of human perception and cognition. The main aim of the project is to develop methodologies and research strategies toward an interdisciplinary study of human cognition as well as to address ethical and cognitive challenges of the contemporary world.