Contact Information
810 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
Office Hours
Open Zoom Office Hours: W 2:30 - 3:30. https://illinois.zoom.us/j/2441875090?pwd=VndIVEN3Y3ZtRmRvSUVvUkJOUnYxQT09
Biography
Philosophy graduate student with a diversity of interests (or a surplus of indecision, you decide).
See Philosophy Research Interests below. Outside of research, I'm very invested in teaching and Public Philosophy. I run an undergraduate reading group and tutorial series where I present an article every meeting (send an e-mail or come to Zoom OH if you're interested). Current theme is Philosophy & Psychology of Love. I also teach in Adult Education at the City Colleges of Chicago during the summers.
Outside of Philosophy, I work as a counselor at the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. This work motivates a lot of my current interest in defining psychopathology and therapy.
I also occasionally publish creative non-fiction, fiction and interactive fiction. Most recent work is a short story about Socrates' son. In a past life, I also wrote Science Fiction and was an editor for a small literary magazine.
Research Interests
4 themes to my work, see Research Description for what I'm working on right now.
- Philosophy of Psychology: Bringing to light the conceptual underpinnings of modern psychological work, especially clinical psychology and neuroscience. In particular, I like to trace how normative and moral concepts subtly work their way into psychological science.
- Aesthetics: Interested in understanding how art works on a psychological, mechanistic level. Experimental Aesthetics is a particular interest.
- Meta-ethics & Moral Psychology: Interested in empirical moral psychology and applying an empirical lens to moral psychological perspectives in Philosophy (especially Bernard Williams, Susan Wolf, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and other Existentialists).
- Meta-philosophy: Trying to figure out why we keep doing this philosophy thing to ourselves. Is philosophy pathological over-thinking? Is it a therapy for a particular sickness of the soul?
Research Description
Current project is on taxonomies of psychopathology and what it means to be mentally ill.
This paper, the first part of my dissertation, looks at where we got our scientific definition of mental illness (spoilers: it wasn't from experiments) and how that definition has always been profoundly pragmatic and normative. Given that it's normative anyway, I advocate that scientists and clinicians engage with the philosophical nature of defining mental illness, as well as the cultural impact that definition has, rather than retreating into seemingly-neutral statistical or neuroscientific definitions.
Education
B.A., Philosophy, Northwestern University
Grants
2023-4 Foreign Language and Area Studies Grant (Greek)