Julian Chehirian is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University in the Program for the History of Science and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities.
He is co-organizing the Critique & Creation symposium on the future of artistic-research and practice-based research alongside Professor D. Graham Burnett—a program sponsored by IHUM and taking place at the American Academy of Arts and Letters on April 5th, 2025. The event is open for advance registration.
Chehirian’s dissertation presents a history of "attention therapies"—a set of mid-century experiments at the interface of studio art and the therapeutic mind sciences. Ranging from early experiments in art psychotherapy to mental hygiene, occupational therapy, phenomenological psychiatry and spiritually inflected somatic practices, the project follows a constellation of interdisciplinary art and science researchers. Among them were progressive educators, artists and self-taught psychologists who fashioned new forms of knowledge in a series of “scientific studios”, entwining psycho-scientific and artistic practices to re-envision post-war attention, psychotherapy and psychiatry.
The IHUM program has supported an ongoing mingling of his artistic and scholarly practices. In 2024, he represented the Bulgarian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Art Biennale with “The Neighbours", which unsilenced a period of political violence that had not previously been acknowledged by the Bulgarian state. A product of 20-years of research and 10-years of studio work, the project (a collaboration with Krasimira Butseva and Lilia Topouzova curated by Vasil Vladimirov) proposed how we might narrate shared memories absent from archives or subjected to collective silence. The pavilion was supported by the Department of History, IHUM, and the Humanities Council at Princeton, as well as by the University of Toronto and the Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria.
His scholarly writing appears in edited collections for Yale University Press, Columbia University Press, Bloomsbury, and in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. He was previously a Fulbright researcher in Bulgaria, and prior to that, received a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from American University.