people
Steven Hrotic's academic career has been disciplinarily heterogeneous. As an undergraduate at the University of Vermont, he studied music history, tutored astronomy, worked in a museum, and developed a seminar on alchemy all the while double-majoring in Anthropology and Religion. The unifying theme is an interest in cultural narratives: how do social groups arrange information (be it ideas, facts, sounds or objects) into meaningful sequences, how is that meaning associated with group identity, and how do meanings change as they are shared between individuals?
During his Ph.D. work (in the Institution for Cognition and Culture, Queen's University, Belfast) Steven applied evolutionary perspectives to these questions. His dissertation investigated academia: are there narratives for academic identity, do disciplines function as social groups, and is peer review inevitably biased as a result? He has recently completed a post-doctorate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands under biologist Dr. Simon Reader. There, he experimentally investigated "cumulative cultural evolution" and the social nature of aesthetics.