I am currently the James A. and Susan K. Keller Fellow in Philosophy at Wofford College. I received my Ph.D. and MA in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, my BA in Philosophy, Anthropology, and History from Oakland University, and my Associate's degree in Liberal Arts from Oakland Community College.

 

Most of my research is tied in one way or another to questions of how we should live (especially how we should live together). More precisely I work primarily in political philosophy (especially non-ideal theory), practical ethics, and normative ethics, but I am also interested in related parts of other subfields like normative epistemology and the philosophy of social science. Something that particularly interests me given my background in history and anthropology is to consider the implications of general claims made by my fellow western philosophers for times and places outside contemporary Europe and North America. These implications, I believe, are too often ignored and are important in assessing the truth of the general claims. I am primarily trained in the analytic branch of the western tradition, and this is the tradition within which I conduct my own research. That being said, I strive to practice what Stephen Angle calls "rooted global philosophy," which involves constructively engaging with other traditions of philosophy on their own terms while being rooted in one's own. In particular, my research tends to draw on American Indian/First Nations philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and Africana philosophy.

 

When I am not doing philosophy, I can often be found reading (usually fiction or work in the social sciences) or obeying the whims of my feline overlord.