Grad School Gothic: The Mysteries of Udolpho and the Academic #MeToo Movement

In the age of #MeToo, the Female Gothic rises from the critical crypt once again. Examining the educational narrative of Emily St. Aubert in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, I argue that the Female Gothic has always vividly portrayed emotional invalidation – a term borrowed from cognitive psychologist Marsha Linehan – as a tool to silence righteous, yet naïve, voices and perpetuate imbalances of social power. As the recent #MeToo movement in academic culture demonstrates, the fourth-wave feminist critique of workplace discrimination targets not only sexual misconduct, but also intellectual misconduct. I propose that, often, discrimination in academic spaces uses the very same tool portrayed in the Female Gothic. In this paper, I look to the Female Gothic as well as to feminist pedagogical theory to offer solutions to the problem of emotional invalidation in the Grad School Gothic.

Being Irrationally Funny as a Cognitive Psychologist: Interview With Dan Ariely

The idea of interviewing Dan Ariely was somehow latent on my mind since I started being interested in cognitive psychology and cognitive behavior psychotherapy, but actually got more ardent ever since irrationality became a research topic for his team at Duke University. I picked him as an interviewee thinking not only at his exceptional skills as a researcher and as Kahnemann ‘disciple’, but mainly for his fantastic wit, true modesty and utmost interest in making people’s lives easier and more comfortable, by creating awareness on a lot of topics otherwise neglected. Dan Ariely’s very agreeable personality and humor would not let you think of him as a burnt casualty who, in his youth struggled to survive a personal drama, so well-documented in his paper “Painful lessons” posted on the MIT website (http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/mypain.pdf). I think reading his paper and also this transcribed interview with him would be also comforting for people who found out about Bucharest fire incident that rocked our society and also for people who are personally related to this tragedy.

Revisiting a Vitruvian preface: the value of multiple skills in contemporary architectural pedagogy

Recent criticisms in architectural pedagogy suggest that schools of architecture tend to privilege a narrow section of designers with limited skill-sets, neglecting individual differences. In order to encourage architectural pedagogy to become more inclusive, this paper revisits the value of multiple skill-sets in architectural design – following an original suggestion by Vitruvius – exploring it through the framework of multiple intelligences developed by cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner.