Research Experience

Dr. Pablo Markin was recruited to his present position as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for German Studies at the European Forum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, before he has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation at the Modern Languages and Cultural Studies Department of the University of Alberta, Canada, in November 2008. His work on his doctoral dissertation, entitled "Cultural Accumulation in Richard Münch's Sociology of Modernity, Systems of Accumulation, and Action," demanded reading knowledge of German language, contacts with his German colleagues and overseas research stays. Apart from his contribution to the larger discussion on the relations between classical and contemporary sociological theory, in his dissertation he argues that more attention should be payed to less well known social and cultural thinkers whose works are presently accessible only to the public sufficiently proficient in German language. His dissertation was published by GRIN Verlag, Germany, in January 2009. Additionally, he has won a research grant for his research project on contemporary art biennials in Berlin and Jerusalem from the Center for German Studies of the Hebrew University in 2009.

To collect materials for his dissertation, Dr. Markin has conducted an independent research trip to New York in 2006. In 2007, he has been invited as a Visiting Scholar to the German Language and Literature Department of Columbia University, USA. In New York, he worked under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Huyssen, a leading German Studies scholar and cultural theorist of modernism, postmodernism and globalization, to do extensive fieldwork at major art museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The research experience thus accumulated has served as an invaluable contribution to bringing the doctoral research project of Dr. Markin to completion. Throughout his doctoral studies, he has forged and maintained multiple connections across different academic departments, such as Art History, Sociology, and Anthropology. His work as a research assistant has involved command of working knowledge of Spanish, French, and Ukrainian languages as he has worked on website design and database management, draft preparation of literary encyclopedia entries, and independent research of primary sources and scholarly corpora. Additionally, as a doctoral student, he has been actively involved in the many years of activity of Space and Culture Scholarly Research Group of the University of Alberta.

Supervised by Prof. Rob Shields, who served as scholarly mentor and doctoral supervisor of Dr. Markin, this internationally known research group has held bi-weekly meetings at which contemporary and classical works in areas ranging from post-structural theory, cultural studies, contemporary philosophy and sociological theory were studied by graduate students, visiting scholars and academic staff. As a student of Prof. Shields, Dr. Markin has acquired valuable interdisciplinary experience in research areas such as metropolitan studies, urban studies, and cultural theory. Moreover, Dr. Markin continues to maintain contacts both with his former supervisor and with Prof. Charles Barbour, specializaing in social theory, and Prof. Massimo Verdicchio, a translator of contemporary Italian philosophy. Prior to his winning of prestigious FS Chia Doctoral Award at the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research of the University of Alberta in 2003, he has worked as an independent research assistant at the headquarters of the Jewish Agency for Israel in Jerusalem since 2001.