Julian Chehirian

Julian Chehirian is a historian of science and multimedia artist whose work examines how human attention became an object and medium of scientific, technological, and organizational management across the 20th century, and across the Cold War divide. At the Science History Institute, he is developing a book project, The Acoustics of Care and Control: Synthetic Materials and the Material Governance of Attention in Postwar America, which follows polymers, foams, resins, and elastomers through the postwar office, factory, classroom, and hospital to show how attention became governable at the scale of built environments. He defended his dissertation, “The Clinical Studio: Art, Attention, and the Mind Sciences,” in April 2026 at Princeton University; it recovers a largely forgotten history of experiments at the intersection of psychiatry, education, and the arts to trace the rise of art therapy and occupational therapy as practices of psychological adjustment and therapeutic mediation. As a Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works in spring 2026, he is rebuilding late-19th-century psychoacoustic instruments to investigate the laboratory origins of human-machine interaction.