Our Team
talkPOPc Founder and President: Dena Shottenkirk
As both a professional philosopher and artist, Dena Shottenkirk has received terminal degrees in each: an MFA in painting from Rutgers’ University Mason Gross School of the Arts, and a PhD in Philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center. She was also staff art critic for both Artforum and Art in America, and she was the Head of the MFA at the Glasgow School of Art, along with positions at various other institutions. Dena has been working with the team at talkPOPc since our formation in 2012, while continuing as an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College. She also acts as a Resident Philosopher for talkPOPc.
For more information on Dena visit denashottenkirk.org
talkPOPc Vice-President: Flora Brandl
Flora Brandl is a PhD candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests include global contemporary art, histories of performance art, postcolonial theory, and Cold War studies. She holds an M.A. in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Flora has taught at Hunter College and at The Cooper Union, and was a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Brooklyn College.
talkPOPc Treasurer: Aharon Grama
Aharon Grama is Administrative Coordinator in the Finance Office at Brooklyn College. He was raised in an ultra-orthodox community and left his community to live a self-determined life. He served 3 years in the military. He graduated from Brooklyn College, which he entered with an HSE (high school equivalency) in the BC bound program which he also was peer mentor in. Aharon served as the President of the Undergraduate Student Government at Brooklyn College.
talkPOPc Secretary: Francesca Salter
Francesca is a recent philosophy graduate of Brooklyn College. She graduated summa cum laude, having been awarded the Philosophy Merit Award (2024), the Philosophy award for outstanding work at the Humanities and Social Sciences Student Expo (2024), and the Beth J. Singer Philosophy Scholarship (2020 & 2021). As a lover of both art and philosophy, Francesca is passionate about talkPOPc’s core values, and she manages the project’s administrative responsibilities.
talkPOPc Audio engineer and Podcast director: Andrey Ligayi
Andrey is the guy wearing the headphones, adjusting mic stands and volume knobs! He assists with all audio production for the talkPOPc project, and also runs a podcast of his own while working full-time in pharma/biotech marketing. He’s a Brooklyn College graduate, and does the behind the scenes work for our conversations. Evidently, that makes him a good listener!
talkPOPc Curatorial Adviser: Magda Sawon
Born in Warsaw Poland, Magdalena Sawon is a gallerist, art historian, writer, curator and educator. She is a co-founder and director of Postmasters Gallery established in New York in 1984 where she organized over 400 exhibitions. Postmasters Gallery opened in East Village in December 1984, moved to Soho in 1989 and - in 1998 - to Chelsea for 15 years. 2013-2022 Postmasters occupied a large two- exhibitions venue in Tribeca and is currently in its fifth reiteration as Postmasters 5.0, the roving, nomadic gallery. The radical change of the gallery model was widely covered in the press. The artworks are generally content oriented, conceptually based, and - most importantly - reflect engagement in issues of our time.
Sawon also works as an independent curator, lecturer, and consultant. She served on the board of Rhizome, a digital arts organization, now affiliated with the New Museum and is a founding member
talkPOPc Videographer:
Katharina Birkmann
Katharina Birkmann is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vienna, currently studying Transart and Art and Film. Working across mediums including video, video installation and performance, she explores the relationship between media, narrative, and historical representation. By examining questions of representation and reflecting on the medium itself, she challenges traditional narratives and explores how histories are constructed and communicated. She has collaborated with institutions, like Austrian National Library, The Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ), and Volkstheater Vienna.
talkPOPc Photographer: John McCarten
John McCarten is a photojournalist and our photographer for gallery talks and public philosophy events. He is also the photographer for New York City Hall, where he documents all that goes on there as well. Always able to get the most vivid shot, it is John who sees the pleasure of the participants and captures it. johnmccarten.com
talkPOPc Puppeteer: Christina Rodriquez
Christina is an NYC-based puppeteer, puppet designer, and educator whose original puppet works have been featured at venues across the U.S. and as far away as the Czech Republic. She is the creator/puppeteer of ShakesBEARS, a puppet content platform that introduces children to classic literature and inspiring BIPOC figures (www.shakesbears.com). She also teaches puppetry at an arts-oriented school in New York and is the puppeteer for "Popsy"--the talkPOPc Puppet.
talkPOPc Puppet: Popsey
This is our mascot. Always willing to listen and to philosophically ruminate, our puppet is a stand in for all our many Resident Philosophers: professional philosophers from many different universities who participant in talkPOPc and are the ones who are really the beneficiaries, for they get to LISTEN, first-hand, to the amazing things that participants say.
Our Resident Philosophers
Craig K. Agule
Craig K. Agule is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy & Religion at Rutgers University–Camden. His research is in philosophy of law and moral psychology, and he is interested in the intersection of these areas and particularly in issues about moral and legal responsibility and the normative conditions of blame and of punishment.
He can be contacted at craig.agule@rutgers.edu. His published philosophy can be found at: https://philpapers.org/s/Craig%20K.%20Agule
Carolina Flores
Carolina Flores is an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Santa Cruz and earned their Ph.D. in philosophy at Rutgers, New Brunswick in 2022. She works at the intersection of philosophy of mind, epistemology, and social philosophy and is interested in evidence-resistance and the dynamics of belief revision, especially in social and political contexts. Their work has been published (or is forthcoming) in Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, and Synthese, among other places.
They use the pronouns she/they and can be contacted at caro.flores@ucsc.edu. Her published philosophy can be found at: https://philpapers.org/s/Carolina%20Flores
Sascha Benjamin Fink
Sascha Benjamin Fink is the Director of Research of the Centre for Philosophy and AI Research {PAIR} at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and an affiliated researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow as well as the Center for Behavioral Brain Sciences at Magdeburg. Before, he was the Juniorprofessor for Neurophilosophy at the philosophy department at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. He also serves as an Editor-in-Chief of the independent, cost-free, diamond open-access journal Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, which he founded with Wanja Wiese and Jennifer Windt in 2019.
His publications concern the philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of perception, and philosophy of science. Most of his work can be found open access at: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=uMti-qQAAAAJ&hl=de.
Nicholas Whittaker
Nicholas Whittaker is an assistant professor in Wesleyan University’s philosophy department. He received his PhD at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research is focused on a cluster of interrelated questions bubbling out of philosophy of race, aesthetics, phenomenology, and metaphilosophy.
He can be contacted at nicholaswhittaker19@gmail.com. His published philosophy can be found at: https://www.nwhittaker.com/new-page
Martin Nitsche
Dr. Nitsche is Chair of the Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. His research focuses on phenomenology, philosophy of art, aesthetics, political philosophy, theory of media and phenomenology of religion. He is the guest editor at Open Philosophy topical issue “Philosophy and Sonic Research- Thinking with Sounds and Rhythms”.
He can be contacted at nitsche.martin@gmail.com. His published philosophy can be found at: https://cas-cz.academia.edu/MartinNitsche
Vincent Peluce
Vincent Peluce is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. After completing his BA in philosophy at UC Berkeley, he got his MA in philosophy at Central European University, in Budapest and wrote his thesis on Plato's Sophist. His focus is on the history of philosophy, logic, and some specific issues in the philosophy of math. He has lectured on philosophy at Baruch College, Brooklyn College, and the New School for Social Research.
His published philosophy can be found at: https://www.vpeluce.com/research
Laura Gradowski
Laura Gradowski completed her Ph.D. at the City University of New York, Graduate Center in 2022. Her recent work focuses on the status and reception of fringe theories in science. Drawing on theoretical considerations as well as case studies in the history of science, she argues that the marginalization of fringe theories is generally unjustified and delays scientific advancements. She defends theoretical pluralism as a solution to problems that arise as a result of theory entrenchment, including observational neglect. Gradowski also has interests in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. She has done work on consciousness, and is beginning to explore the science of placebo effects.
She can be contacted at laura.gradowski@gmail.com. Her published philosophy can be found at: https://lauragradowski.com/GradowskiPapers.html
Ian Olasov
Ian Olasov is a recent graduate of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and teaches philosophy at New York University. His research interests are broad, but all address questions about speech in the public interest. His book Ask a Philosopher: Answers to Your Most Important and Most Unexpected Questions was published in 2020 with St. Martin’s Press, and he co-edited, with Lee McIntyre and Nancy McHugh, A Companion to Public Philosophy (Wiley, 2022). He is the current president of the Public Philosophy Network, and is the founder and organizer of Brooklyn Public Philosophers, a public philosophy event series for a general audience.
He can be contacted at ianolasov@gmail.com. His published works can be found at: https://ianolasov.com/
Kate Pendoley
Kate Pendoley is an assistant professor in philosophy at Vassar College and earned her PhD in Philosophy with a concentration in Cognitive Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in September, 2020. Her work is on empirically informed philosophy of emotion, with a focus on how interactions with other mental states can reveal the role of emotions in the mind. Her research bears on questions in philosophy of mind about intentionality and consciousness, and also on questions about how emotion norms can reinforce oppressive social systems.
She can be contacted at katependoley@gmail.com. Her published philosophy can be found at: https://www.katependoley.com/research
Johannes Brandl
Johannes Brandl studied philosophy and German literature at the University of Graz in Austria. His PhD thesis was on the semantics of proper names, and he worked for four years as a postdoc at the Archives and Research Centre for Austrian Philosophy, mostly doing work on the unpublished manuscripts of Franz Brentano. In 1991, he became Assistant Professor at the University of Salzburg and was tenured in 2001 and has held visiting positions at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and the University of California in Irvine in 1999, 2009 and 2019. In 2020 he was promoted to Associate Professor for Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Salzburg.
He can be contacted at johannes.brandl@sbg.ac.at. His published work can be found at: https://www.johannesbrandl.com/publications/
Martina Botti
Martina Botti is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Columbia University. She specializes in metaphysics and ancient philosophy and is currently serving as Editorial Coordinator at the Journal of Philosophy.
She can be contacted at mb4323@columbia.edu. Her published work can be found at: https://philpeople.org/profiles/martina-botti
Andrew Rubner
Andrew Rubner is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science. Next fall he will be a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at NYU, having completed his dissertation at Rutgers under the supervision of Susanna Schellenberg. He also has research and teaching interests in philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. He is a member of Manish Singh and Jacob Feldman's joint visual cognition lab at Rutgers, where he is completing a certificate in Cognitive Science with Manish Singh on the misperception of aspect ratio of two-dimensional surfaces.
He can be contacted at andrew.rubner@gmail.com. His published philosophy can be found at: https://philpapers.org/s/Andrew%20Rubner
Itsue Nakaya-Pérez
Itsue Nakaya-Pérez is a philosophy PhD student at The Graduate Center. They did their undergraduate studies at UNAM in Mexico City, where they were also a fellow student at the Institute for Philosophy Research. They work in the areas of social ontology, philosophy of psychiatry, feminist philosophy, and decolonial philosophy. Their work focuses on the categorization of human beings and its interaction with context, cognition, and identity. Particularly, they are interested in the relationship between the self and the natural or social kinds we are members of.
They can be contacted at itsuue@gmail.com and their published philosophy can be found at: www.itsue.org and https://philpeople.org/profiles/itsue-nakaya-perez
Jordan Bridges
Jordan Bridges is a doctoral student at Rutgers - New Brunswick, Department of Philosophy. She specializes in Social and Political Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, and Philosophy of Action.
She can be contacted at jordan.bridges@rutgers.edu and her published philosophy can be found at: https://philpeople.org/profiles/jordan-bridges