New members of the department

A visiting lecturer in philosophy Laura Viidebaum completed her Ph.D. studies in Classics at Cambridge University in 2015 after which she moved to New York to take up first a Visiting Assistant Professorship and subsequently the Assistant Professorship in Greek at New York University. Laura’s main research interests center around rhetoric, ancient philosophy and literary criticism, but she is also very interested in drama (of all periods and contexts!) and often finds herself thinking about the political changes of the first century BCE Rome and Greece. She has just finished her monograph on the emergence of rhetorical tradition in Classical Athens (to be published with Cambridge University Press in 2021), and is currently working on articles on the concept of intellectuals (past and present), ‘Socrates and his critics’, ‘Aspasia and sophists’, and Cicero’s philosophical dialogue. Starting from next academic year, Laura will be a Humboldt fellow in Munich, where she aims to get started with her newest project on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In Tartu, Laura looks also forward to testing out her recently completed translation of Plato’s Euthydemus on students and colleagues.

Kristin Kokkov has taken up the position of Junior Research Fellow of Philosophy of Science on the 1st of September 2020. She is currently working on her PhD thesis "Evidential Reasoning and Knowledge Formation Methods in the Humanities on the Basis of Archaeology". Her research focuses on epistemic questions in historical sciences, more specifically on evidential reasoning, inferential scaffolding, and interdisciplinarity in archaeological research.