Research

My research in ethics, existentialism, philosophy and literature, and social and political philosophy is informed by a commitment to narrative and to lived experience. Stories can serve as important sources of understanding because they take the stuff of people’s lives and contextualize it with emotional and evaluative import. This means that the stories people tell about themselves convey how their experiences matter. And other people who engage with those stories can better appreciate how their experiences matter to them.

 

My dissertation, “Narrative Receptivity, and Understanding Others,” takes a narrative approach to ameliorating structural oppression. It develops an account for how to engage with the stories and experiences of others, especially in relations of privilege and oppression, such that people take structural oppression and those who face oppression more seriously. Part of my argument is to interrogate the limits of understanding others. In my interrogation, I critique how people overstate the extent to which we can appreciate the experiences of others in relations of privilege and oppression.

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My article titled "Form, Language, and Self-Understanding in Beauvoir's 'The Woman Destroyed'" has been published in Simone de Beauvoir Studies and my article "Narrative Identity and Recognition Deficiency" has been published in The British Journal of Aesthetics.

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I am currently working on the following papers:

 

"Exposing Master Narratives, Facilitating Counterstories, and Resisting Misogyny: The Narrative Framework of Manne's Down Girl" (in progress)

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"The Pitfalls of Understanding Others through Narrative: Misrepresentation, Fetishization, and Co-option" (in progress)​

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"Narrative Receptivity and Political Responsibility" (in progress)

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"Interrogating the Distance between Life and Literature" (in progress)

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"The Precarity of Narrative Identity" (in progress)

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