Adam Pugen

FACULTY FELLOW

Adam Pugen, PhD

I have long been interested in the relationship between rational inquiry, existential meaning, and the aesthetic ways in which ordinary and transcendent experience is symbolized by different forms of human culture. Discovering the work of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and later St. Thomas Aquinas, has provided me with endlessly fruitful avenues for exploring this relationship as it pertains to – in my opinion – some of the most crucial developments of contemporary culture.  Receiving my PhD at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information in 2020, I wrote my dissertation “The Intellective Touch: A Phenomenology of Digital Modernism” as an attempt to develop a model of phenomenological aesthetics that might shed light on the existential challenges and opportunities of the digital media environment.

I have taught at the University of Toronto and the University of St. Thomas in Houston, and I continue to research psychological and aesthetic frameworks that help bring to light and counteract the power of media environments to shape human perception and behavior.