I am an assistant professor of philosophy at Boston College. This site contains information about my writing and teaching, including some of my published essays, works-in-progress, and syllabi from courses that I’ve taught.
This spring I am teaching in the PULSE program at BC. I am also teaching an upper-level course on contemporary Aristotelian naturalism. Last semester I taught an upper-level course called Kant and Kantians on the Moral Law.
Before coming to Boston College, I worked for a year at the Asian University for Women, in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Before that, I was a graduate student in the department of philosophy at the University of Chicago, where I completed my PhD in June 2011. My dissertation defends an Aristotelian “natural goodness” view in moral philosophy. Such a view holds that moral goodness is the goodness proper to our human nature, analogous to species-specific forms of goodness in plants and non-human animals. Much of my academic writing aims to develop this Aristotelian approach – to defend it against critics, and to extend it into new areas.
Along with ethics, I am also very interested in political philosophy. As a graduate student, I taught two courses on human rights. At AUW, I taught both intro-level and upper-level undergraduate courses in political philosophy. One of those courses – The State of Nature and the Nature of the State – explored the various ways that conceptions of nature have figured into philosophical accounts of the political community and political authority.
My writing mostly focuses on contemporary debates that have deep historical roots. But I also enjoy working directly on historical texts, especially in ancient Greek philosophy. I have published a paper on Plato’s Sophist, and another paper on the Crito is in progress. I also taught three courses on Plato at the Newberry Library in Chicago, most recently on the Republic.
You can see photos of my time in south asia here.
The turtle was photographed by a friend. You can see more of her photos here.
