About

Working in political philosophy and aesthetics, I examine how the places we live, and the aesthetics contained within them, shape the conditions of political agency and belonging. I treat place not as a neutral backdrop to political life, but as an environment that orients how agents perceive, inhabit, and act. In this way, everyday environments and practices structure who feels at home in a space, how agents understand their standing within a political community, and what forms of action are possible or permissible.

My dissertation argues for the rehabilitation of taste as a genuine aesthetic sense, developing an account of gustatory aesthetic perception as trained, attention-governed, and socially embedded in a world of objects whose aesthetic properties are genuinely there to be perceived. I argue that the existing rehabilitation literature has focused on establishing food and wine as aesthetic objects without addressing the tradition's original question: whether the sense of taste can perceive aesthetic properties at all. Answering this question requires an account of what first-hand gustatory perceptual engagement with aesthetic properties consists in, and what trained tasters perceive that grounds the normative structure of gustatory aesthetic judgment. I argue that the aesthetic properties of gustatory objects register in trained perceptual experience as indeterminate intimations that gustatory attention converts into determinate aesthetic perception.

In my political philosophy work, I examine displacement and the home and homemaking, asking what these reveal about political agency. I am developing this in two directions: toward a broader account of place and agency, and toward questions about the home and identity, where I am interested in the role the home plays in sustaining continuity of identity across time and disruption.

I am also developing a project at the intersection of my two research areas, examining the relationship between aesthetics and political agency. Building on my work on place and agency, and on the account of trained perceptual attention developed in my dissertation, I am interested in how aesthetic attention to the built environment can disclose the conditions under which belonging is possible. The thought is that trained aesthetic attention is not merely a matter of taste, but a politically significant capacity: one that reveals how designed environments orient agency, structure who feels at home, and make certain forms of political life intelligible or invisible.

In my teaching, I design courses that ask how political life is shaped through everyday places and practices. In The Politics of Home, we examined the threshold between public and private spheres, challenging this boundary by exploring the role the home plays in political life and the ways it can function as a site for the formation and sustaining of political agency. In The Refugee Crisis, students investigated the conditions of displacement and belonging, the role these play in political life, and what it means to lack political belonging altogether.

Across my research and teaching, I am interested in how political agency is formed through environments, practices, and aesthetics. In both contexts, I emphasize how place shapes the conditions under which political life becomes intelligible and possible. 

I graduated from Western Michigan University with B.A.'s in English: Creative Writing, Global & International Studies, and German in 2018, and an M.A. in Philosophy in 2020.  I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy at the University of Virginia, where I am expected to finish in 2027.