Curriculum Vitae

I recently graduated with my doctorate in Philosophy and Education from Columbia University in the City of New York. I am also a recent graduate of the Scholars Program at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Haven, CT.

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Starting in fall 2025, I will be a candidate in the Licensure-Qualifying Program in Psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology.

 

I am a first-generation college graduate from a working-class family in the Appalachians of rural Western Pennsylvania. This positionality deeply informs my entire way of life.

 

I have taught at a number of institutions, including most recently in the Department of Arts and Humanities at Teachers College, Columbia University and in the Philosophy Department at Fordham University. In a 2022 observation report, a tenured faculty member at Fordham declared that I am "among the very best college teachers [they] have seen in action, anywhere," adding that my teaching style is "radically student-centered but uncommon in its execution" and concluding that, if they could, they would "immediately hire [me] into a permanent position."

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My published works have appeared in Teachers College Record (2020), the Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology (Edward Elgar, 2024), and The Marcusean Mind (Routledge, 2024). The last of these, entitled "Extinction Rebellion: A Great Refusal for the Anthropocene," was honored with awards from both the American Educational Research Association and the Center for Sustainable Futures, and it was also nominated for the Iris Marion Young Award from the Radical Philosophy Association.

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I am an editor of The Frommian Mind, a forthcoming volume on the sociologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm for Routledge's Philosophical Minds book series.

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I am the recent recipient of an American Psychoanalytic Association Fellowship and the past recipient of a National Merit Scholarship.

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My interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on the question of existential education in the Anthropocene. In my dissertation, entitled "Mortal Foresight: Learning to Live through Extinction," I draw on my activism with the environmental movement Extinction Rebellion as well as on the works of numerous philosophical and psychoanalytic thinkers (including Freud, Fromm, Lear, Marcuse, and Winnicott) to support my argument that education today must be radically reoriented toward existential transformation and the construction of a global ecosocialist society if both human and non-human life are to survive the Earth's ongoing sixth extinction event. In other words, this utopian vision for education is meant to suggest an adaptive response to planetary ecocide in the Anthropocene, or what Robert Jay Lifton has called "the climate swerve."