About Noga Arikha

Noga Arikha is a historian of ideas, particularly interested in the relation between mind and body, and in tracing the genealogy of the concepts that pertain to it.

Though she began her studies by focusing on early modern Europe, her interests encompass a wide range of periods and cultures, and her work straddles a multiplicity of disciplines, from philosophy, the cognitive and mind sciences, and anthropology, to the histories of science, psychology, medicine, art, and food.

She endeavours to bridge the divide between the "two cultures" - the sciences and the humanities - and to bring to a general audience accessible accounts that analyse the origins of our deepest concerns about our embodied selves.

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Noga Arikha was born in Paris and raised there, speaking English at home.

At the age of 19, she settled in London, where she followed a foundation art course before studying for a BA in German and Philosophy at King`s College, London. After a brief but formative spell in New York, in 1993, interning as an editorial assistant at the New York Review of Books, she returned to London and joined the Warburg Institute, where she studied the early modern history of ideas, earning an MA in 1996 and a PhD in 2001 ("Adam`s Spectacles: Nature, Mind and Body in the Age of Mechanism", available here).

In 2001-02 she co-curated, with Gloria Origgi, an online conference on the impact of the Internet on texts, text-e, and returned to New York in the Fall of 2002 to take up the "Arts and Neuroscience" Fellowship at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, at Columbia University (2002-03). There she co-curated with Origgi the virtual conference art and cognition, hosted on the Interdisciplines portal, and began work on Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, which was published by Ecco (HarperCollins) in May 2007.

In 2003 she took up a job as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Bard College, upstate NY, to where she commuted until the end of 2005, teaching a freshman "Great Books" seminar on the theme "What is Enlightenment?", and a course on the history of medicine and psychiatry. In 2007 she conducted a seminar entitled "The History of the Body as Matter, from the Paleolithic to the Post-Modern" at the Bard Graduate Center, NYC. In 2008, she organized a workshop on Folk Epistemologies at Columbia`s Italian Academy.

From September 2007 to May 2008 she and her husband Marcello Simonetta, an Italian scholar, writer and curator, were in Bologna, Italy, while she was a Visiting Fellow at the Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris. She joined the board of Editorial Advisors of Lapham`s Quarterly in 2009. Most recently, she and her husband co-authored a biography of Lucien Bonaparte (to be published in 2011). They and their son are based in New York.

_{photo by Natalia Jimenez}

 

CV

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Noga Arikha`s CV.

 

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