The NOMIS Postdoctoral Fellowship Program was launched at eikones — Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel in 2017. Sebastian Zeidler and Ingrid Vendrell-Ferran are the first recipients of the fellowships at eikones, a center dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of images as instruments of human knowledge and cultural practice. The fellowships support groundbreaking research in the interdisciplinary field of image studies, specifically concerning the function of images as models in epistemic, aesthetic and didactic contexts.
Sebastian Zeidler holds a PhD in art theory and art criticism from Columbia University in New York, NY, United States, and most recently held the position of associate professor in the History of Modern Art at Yale University in New Haven, CT, United States. His monograph, “Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art,” was published in 2016. As a NOMIS fellow, he is working on a research project on Edmund Husserl’s image theory and the art of Henri Matisse, investigating, for example, the way in which both the philosopher and the artist consider the possibility of the world’s appearance in its full splendor to depend on the individual’s removal or detachment from that world.
Ingrid Vendrell-Ferran earned a PhD in philosophy from the Free University in Berlin, Germany, in 2007 and qualified as a professor in 2017 with a book on the cognitive forms of literature. She is the author of the monographs “Die Emotionen: Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie” (“Emotions: Feelings in Realistic Phenomenology”), and “Die Vielfalt der Erkenntnis: Eine Analyse des kognitiven Werts der Literatur” (“The Diversity of Knowledge: An Analysis of the Cognitive Value of Literature”). As a NOMIS fellow, she is applying the results of her second book on empathy in literature to the medium of film with a project titled “Imaginative Participation and Empathic Recognition in Documentary Film.”
