Cultivating Attention

"Cultivating Attention" Fall 2025 Lectures: 

Attending to Silence and Quietude: Finding Meaning, Loss, and the Backgroundification of Nature in the Historical Archives

Alexandra Hui

Sound and listening were centrally important to the development of modern conceptions of the environment and environmentalism. Tracing the sounds and silences of the past contribute to individuals’ past — and our own in the present — prompts us to consider the shifting, culturally-bound mechanisms through which we have sensed and perceived and acted upon nature. In this talk I will focus on case studies that help us understand how individuals and communities noticed, attended to, and cared about silence over the course of the twentieth century in the U.S. context: Early twentieth-century efforts to collect the voices of vanishing species and then use these wild-recorded sounds of nature in radio programming, contributing to an association of silence with extinction, a birder’s struggle with age-related hearing loss, and the popular use of “improved sounds of nature” in built environments in the 1970s to muffle and replace the sounds (and silences) of the built environment. I argue that, among several unintended consequences of putting nature sounds to work, perhaps the most consequential for how the public understood and experienced their world in the last decades of the twentieth century was the further backgroundification of the non-built environment. Examining the sensation, perception, and documentation of silence in the archive opens up categorical and ontological questions about how change is determined, challenging the very practice of history.

Alexandra Hui is Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University. Her monograph, co-edited volumes, and articles examine the intersection of music, sound, silence, and science. Her current projects are histories of background music, how scientists listen to the environment, and how historians can intervene in the global climate emergency.

Cultivating Attention in the Era of AI

Carlos Montemayor

Research on attention is becoming relevant for discussions on artificial intelligence and political philosophy. With respect to artificial intelligence, the thesis that a capacity similar to attention is crucial for contextualizing information intelligently has gained momentum. In political theory, the attention economy has triggered an interdisciplinary investigation into the sources of our addiction to social media and of our loneliness crisis. These two research programs are at odds. The “automatized” understanding of our attention, as part of our general intelligence, is part of the problem that the political approach to attention is trying to criticize and challenge. In this talk, I propose a framework to bridge these two incompatible research programs, offering solutions that may ameliorate the problems associated with our contemporary attention crisis. 

Carlos Montemayor is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. He has published research on various aspects of attention, including the books Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention: A Theory of Epistemic Agency (Cambridge University Press), and The Prospect of a Humanitarian Artificial Intelligence: Agency and Value Alignment (Bloomsbury).

The Attention Zoo

Henry Cowles

Attention has been a tool of academic psychologists for as long as the field has existed; but as a research object, it has a shorter history. This paper traces attention's shift from independent to dependent variable in cognitive science through the field's preferred model organisms. Some of the animals in attention's "zoo" will be familiar (rats, of course, as well as both human and non-human primates), while others might be less so (stray cats, designer puppies, dolphins). In the end, the paper offers both a serviceable (if partial) history of attention research as well as a heuristic for assessing how the tools we use to study the mind ultimately shape the theories all that studying produces. 

Henry M. Cowles is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, where he writes and teaches about topics that include psychology, addiction, self-help, and expertise. He is the author of The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Harvard University Press, 2020).

Attention’s Limits: Details in Periphery 

Lucy Alford

This talk explores how poems and paintings register human suffering as peripheral detail—felt but often unseen. Attending to Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship alongside W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, I consider how works of art frame disaster in the margins, and how attention itself becomes ethically fraught. What happens when the moment of crisis is barely noticed? What possibilities arise when we pause, look again, and linger in the corner of the frame—where the body enters the water, or the detail refuses to stay background?

Lucy Alford is Associate Professor of Literature at Wake Forest University, specializing in modern and contemporary poetics. Her books include Forms of Poetic Attention (Columbia University Press, 2020) and the poetry collection Daylight / Savings (Black Square Editions, forthcoming 2026). 

The Artwork and the Grounds of Attention

Joanna Fiduccia

Artworks enjoy a privileged status in scholarship and popular writing about attention, often justified by their perceived ability to hold together two ideals of attention. On one hand, art seems purpose-built for sustained contemplation; on the other, it appears like a congelation of the artist’s immersive and unified attention. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, some artists and art historians sought out different models, responding to modern assaults on attention by turning away from its intensive, self-reliant, and conventionally masculinized modes, and toward a set of (back)ground concerns. Might these models continue to offer alternative figures for the subject of attention today?

Joanna Fiduccia is Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Her first book, Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism, will be published in spring 2026. She is currently working on a study of the evolving relationship between political sovereignty and automatism. 

Attention as Medium from Psychoanalysis to Psychodynamic Art 

Julian Chehirian

This talk examines attention as both a method and a medium in psychoanalysis and contemporary art. It asks how a history of attention reframes our understanding of art and psychotherapy’s capacities to remake subjects. From Freud to Heimann and Bion, psychoanalysts have treated attention not just as an object of therapy but as its very medium and means of transforming the mind. These insights will be extended to contemporary art, where attention operates as an embodied medium for meaning-making. The talk engages with contemporary multimedia installation works through the lens of attention, including Chehirian's own artistic work, shown at the 60th Venice Art Biennale.

Julian Chehirian is a Princeton History of Science PhD candidate and multimedia artist investigating attention across the history of the human sciences. In his artistic practice, he forms relationships between objects, spaces, and sound; in his academic work, he writes & teaches on the future of art.

Attention, Technology, and Social Unity

Carolyn Dicey Jennings

Attention is the source of our power. Before every choice and action, you first organize your world through attention—your priorities push some things closer to the center, other things to the sidelines. The center then shapes your thoughts, choices, and behaviors. In my view, without this ability we would not have agency or autonomy—we wouldn't be selves. But we are more than selves. Our priorities and projects are bound up with others, whose interests shift our own. Our evolutionary history adds more pushing and pulling to this mix, sometimes against our values. All of these influences are woven into a single landscape, controlling our thoughts and actions. Recent technologies change this landscape by favoring what is predictable—our biological propensities and social instincts—and diminishing our role as individuals. This talk will explore whether they also enhance our abilities as social groups. 

Carolyn Dicey Jennings is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science who focuses on attention. She was educated at University of St Andrews and Boston University and has been working at University of California, Merced since 2013. Her first book, The Attending Mind, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2020.