About me

I earned my doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oregon in 2021 specializing in 19th and 20th century continental philosophy (esp. phenomenology), feminist philosophy, and decolonial thought. My research focuses on sense and sense-making, especially as it relates to non-discursive forms of expression. Over the years, I have presented and published on a variety of issues touching upon non-dialogical sense-making practices, decolonizing aesthetics, sexual violation, sexual difference, and (gendered and racialized) temporal oppression. Motivating these projects is a concern for how Western philosophical, cultural, and political practices tend to privilege speech and voice as emancipatory tools and reduce silence to silencing. This concern informs my dissertation, “Decolonizing Silences: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Deep Silence with Anzaldúa and Merleau-Ponty,” in which I develop and defend the concept of “deep silence” to press Western culture (including feminist and liberatory philosophy and social movements) beyond its negative affinities with “silence.” Unlike “silencing,” which is understood as the opposite of speech and signification and, as such, as a matter of an already available utterance being smothered or unspoken, “deep silence” indicates a transformative power that generates meanings that have not yet been voiced and that, importantly, break with colonial norms and expectations. My work has been published in Hypatia, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Chiasmi International, Symposium, the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and Signs. I also have co-edited with Bonnie Mann a volume on Simone de Beauvoir, titled On ne naît pas femme : on le deviant, published by Oxford University Press, and co-founded Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology. I earned a Master’s in Philosophy and Social Policy at American University, where I taught introductory Ethics courses. In Fall 2022, I start at Villanova University as Assistant Professor in Contemporary Continental Philosophy.