Curriculum Vitae

I am currently an ABD doctoral candidate in the Philosophy and Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University in the City of New York. I am also a scholar at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Haven, CT.

 

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 significantly the Philosophy Department at Fordham University. In a recent observation report, a tenured faculty member there 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, titled "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 has also been nominated for the Iris Marion Young Award from the Radical Philosophy Association.

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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 addressing this topic, I draw primarily on the fields of aesthetic education, critical theory and critical pedagogy, environmental sociology, philosophical fiction, and psychoanalysis. Thus, with my dissertation I am articulating a concept I call "mortal foresight," or the human capacity for death vaticination, which I take to be a necessary learning outcome for any education system that aims at cultivating a "radical hope" for the survival of our species amidst the devastating existential crises we face in the Anthropocene.

 

To that same end, I am also a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion NYC, part of the global nonviolent revolutionary movement for climate and ecological justice. (Scroll to the bottom of this page to learn more about my involvement with XR.)