Biography
I am interested in critical philosophical methods that destabilize monolithic explanations and justifications. My research uses phenomenology and genealogy to investigate the issues raised by the philosophy of race. These interests took root during my undergraduate years at Allegheny College, while I was reading philosophical works like Iris Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” and Del McWhorter’s Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America. These projects use the philosophy of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault to pose questions like: How does race pre-reflectively influence how we treat each other? What do histories of social interactions have to tell us about our present dilemmas? How do our physical capacities as embodied, raced, and gendered agents affect how we come to know, fear, and love each other? I have found genealogy and phenomenology to be two powerful methods for addressing these questions. These methods derive their critical power, in part, from their ability to denaturalize the objects under scrutiny; that is, they serve their critical goals by disillusioning us of their object’s claim to self-evidence or universality. I take this disillusionment to be a uniquely powerful kind of critique: phenomenological and genealogical approaches destabilize our previously firm convictions, and a destabilized worldview, I contend, is the ripest for growth and change.
Area of Concentration: Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Race, German Idealism, Phenomenology