Yaroslav Prykhodko
Ph.D. Candidate (ABD)
yprykhod@sas.upenn.edu
Education
B.A., Kharkov National University, Ukraine; , M.A. 2005, Miami University
Research Interests
Early modern intellectual/cultural history, early America, British Atlantic world, Britain, slavery and race, history of the self, eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, human nature, sexuality and gender
Fields
Early America to 1865; early modern Britain; early modern Atlantic history
Committee
Proposed Dissertation
"Soul, Body, and the Moral Imagination in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World"
Personal Statement
My general interest is the philosophical content of everyday life, the interplay between concepts and reality. I like Reinhart Koselleck's idea that concepts can never encompass the richness of life and experience, but at the same time concepts always contain more than is actually lived, thought, and experienced. I study ideas, assumptions, and beliefs about soul and body in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world, and I am interested in dualism as a philosophical problem; I explore the moral imagination of early modern people, and I am fascinated by the general problems their moral imagination raised. I find in early modernity strange, unfamiliar, and curious logic and points of view that disrupt and defamiliarize our our own assumptions about human nature, the self, morality, love, sex, and social life.
