About me

I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. My research engages questions in the areas of animal ethics, the epistemology of emotions, American pragmatism, and feminist philosophy. My articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Journal of Modern Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Hypatia.

 

 

Research

My book project, Animal Values, begins with an obvious yet surprisingly poorly understood claim: we have fallen into habits of consumption that are harming animals. In this book, I draw on the resources from classical pragmatist philosophy to derive an account of the nature of habit and theorize the important role that the feeling of doubt and other emotions play in changing our habits of thought and behavior. Although emotions can skew our epistemic landscapes – by prompting us to look for reasons to justify false beliefs and actions that harm animals – they can also serve as occasions of inquiry, and, hence, as vehicles for how we can change our consumption habits for the better. This is especially true of emotions such as guilt and shame, emotions that we have been taught are bad for us, but which I believe are important for disrupting our cognitive habits and initiating inquiry into our relationship with other animals. I also argue that to make animal suffering salient in the public domain, we need some means of disrupting our habitual ways of thinking and feeling. To this end, I discuss the role that art can play not only in habituating us to a sense of justice, but also in revealing to us that many of the values that matter to us — emotional wellbeing, safety and freedom — also matter to animals. Art, I conclude, can be an effective means by which to initiate collective inquiry into how we can improve the lives of animals.

Teaching

A central focus of my work is how media affect the way that we think. With the rise of multi-media approaches, students are gaining some skills and losing others. I believe good teaching begins from an awareness that current media ecologies offer us endless possibilities for exploration and learning, but they can also narrow our horizon. The logarithmic logic of the internet poses challenges to a new generation of students who have grown up interacting with digital technologies, which is why I believe media literacy should be the central humanistic focus in the classroom. How do we avoid the trappings of google and the internet, technologies that currently serve the needs of coorporations by reducing our likes, opinions and personalities to “data” in order to better serve our so-called consumer-needs? How do we help students navigate digital media environments where it is difficult to identify authoritative sources so that they might become better researchers and well-informed citizens? I believe that a liberal arts education at its best arms students with the analytical tools that they need to arrive at carefully-weighted opinions.