Spring 2022 Coffee Hours: TuTh 10-11:30 am

Ph.D. (Philosophy), University of Kentucky, ABD

M.A. (Philosophy), University of Kentucky, 2017

B.A. (Philosophy), Michigan State University, 2012

B.S. (Zoology), Michigan State University, 2012

In 2007, I began studying zoology at Michigan State University with an interest in wildlife conservation and environmental sciences. After exploring the life sciences a bit, a growing love of neurobiology and its unsolved mysteries turned my attention towards the human animal. My experience in the natural sciences met dramatically with the ideas I encountered in courses on existentialism and social and political philosophy, and I decided to seek a career in philosophy. I completed my undergraduate education interested in research in social and political philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics. In 2014, I began attending the University of Kentucky as a doctoral candidate in philosophy.

Having earned my MA and completed my coursework and qualifying exams, my dissertation is focused on the relation between subjectivity and practices with regard to environmental crises, especially the climate crisis and worldwide losses in biodiversity and animal populations. I am interested in how understanding subjectivity's relationship to practices can inform and improve methods for fostering and activating people's environmental agency. My particular concern regards environmental agency among people whose lifestyles threaten livability on earth even though they have adequate resources and information to live far more sustainably.