Curriculum Vitae
Academic Positions
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Villanova University Fall 2022 - Present
Co-Editor of Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology Fall 2016 - Present
Education
University of Oregon (2021), PhD in Philosophy
AOS: 19th and 20th Century European Philosophy, Decolonial Philosophy (from a Latinx perspective), Feminist Philosophy, Aesthetics
AOC: History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Race, Social-Political Philosophy, Ethics
American University (2013), MA in Philosophy and Social Policy
Delaware State University (2011), BA in Political Science, Minors: Philosophy, Economics
Dissertation
Title: Decolonizing Silences: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Deep Silence with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gloria Anzaldúa
Abstract: Motivated by the concern for how Western philosophical, cultural, and political practices tend to privilege speech and voice as emancipatory tools and reduce silence to silencing, “Decolonizing Silences” develops and defends the concept of “deep silence” to press Western culture 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/modern norms and expectations. First, it draws from contemporary Latinx, decolonial, and women of color feminism to argue that coloniality limits Western understandings of the phenomenon of silence such that silence is treated, at best, as irrelevant to meaning and, at worst, as an obstacle that needs to be overcome for meaning to be obtained. Second, it works closely with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to locate power in silence rather than just in speech and voice. The deep silence entailed in experiences like grieving a loss or bearing witness to personal and collective trauma decenters key assumptions of Western thinking, and reveals signifyingand healing practices often overlooked by Western semiotics, legalism, and Transitional Justice initiatives. Third, it proposes that the modality whereby one bears witness to experiences of marginalization matters when striving to go beyond colonial/modern epistemologies. Drawing from Anzaldúa’s mythopoetics, it argues that tending to the experiences of those victimized by colonial heteropatriarchy without capitulating to colonial/modern apparatuses calls for the mobilization of generative silences in one’s phenomenological descriptions. That is, it calls for a “critical phenomenology of deep silence.”
Honors and Awards
Honors and Awards
2018 – 19 Eric Englund Research Fellowship for best dissertation research in American literature, history, or philosophy
2018 Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy’s Iris Marion Young Prize for best paper in feminist philosophy
Paideia Prize, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, for excellence in graduate teaching
2017 Merleau-Ponty Circle’s M.C. Dillon Award for best graduate student paper
2016 – 17 Oregon Humanities Center Research Interest Group Support Grant
2016 – 17 Center for the Study of Women and Society Research Interest Group Innovation Funding
2016 Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy’s Graduate Student Essay Prize
2016 Admission to the Collegium Phaenomenologicum
2016 University of Oregon Graduate School’s Gray Smith Professional Development Award
2015 PhiloSOPHIA’s Travel Award
2015 University of Oregon’s Graduate Student Association Travel Award
2015 – 16 Center for the Study of Women and Society Research Interest Group Innovation Funding
2015 Southwestern Philosophical Society’s President’s Prize for best graduate student paper
2015 Merleau-Ponty Circle’s M.C. Dillon Award for best graduate student paper
2015 Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy’s Graduate Student Essay Prize
2014 – 19 Graduate Teaching Fellowship, University of Oregon
2011 – 13 Graduate Merit Award, Department of Philosophy, American University
2013 Graduate Student Mellon Travel Grant, College of Arts and Sciences, American University
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
1. "Toward a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporal Harm," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2023.
2. “On Bearing Witness: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Deep Silence,” Chiasmi International’s Special Issue: “La phénoménologie critique après Merleau-Ponty,” 2021, pp. 239-260.
3. “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonial Aesthetics: On Silence and Bearing Witness,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 34(3), 2020, pp. 323-338.
4. “Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits of Voice and the Coloniality of Silence,” Hypatia’s Special Issue: “Indigenizing and Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy,” 2019.
5. “Poietic Transspatiality: Merleau-Ponty, Normativity, and the Latent Sens of Nature,” Chiasmi International 20, 2018, pp. 385-99.
6. “An-Archic Past: Rethinking Negativity with Bergson,” Symposium 21(2), 2017, pp. 230-49.
7. “The Immemorial Time of Gender: Merleau-Ponty’s Polymorphic Matrix of Original Past,” Chiasmi International 18, 2017, pp. 281-92.
8. “Transgressive Freedom: On Beauvoir’s Hegelian Philosophy of Action,” Southwest Philosophy Review 32(1), January 2016, pp. 93-104.
9. “Unreflexive Medicine: The Unspoken ‘Goodness’ of the Normal in the Case of Conjoined Twins’ Separation,” IJFB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 8(1), Spring 2015, pp. 138-55.
Edited Volumes
On ne naît pas femme : on le devient – The Life of a Sentence, edited with Bonnie Mann, Oxford University Press (2017).
Reviews
Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (Fordham University Press, 2015), Chiasmi International 19, 2017, pp. 475-84.
Other Publications
“Editors’ Introduction.” Authored with Devin Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hayes, Sarah McLay, Kaja Rathe Jennsen, and Amie Zimmer. Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 1, 2018, pp. 1-7.
Presentations
Refereed Conference Presentations
2020-2021
“La Llorona’s Spectral Witnessing: On the Silences of a Decolonial Aesthetics,” accepted for the 59th meeting for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), Toronto, October 8-10, 2020; conference and presentation postposed to 2021.
“Anzaldúa’s Historias: Myth, Sense, and Silence in Border Thinking,” accepted for the 14th annual conference of philoSOPHIA, Nashville, May 14-17, 2020; conference and presentation postposed to 2021.
2020
“Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonizing Aesthetics: On Silence, Sense, and the Imaginary,” presented virtually at the 5th Latinx Philosophy Conference, University of Denver, October 30-31, 2020 (originally scheduled for April 23-25, 2020).
2019
“Decolonizing Silence: On the Coloniality of Silence and Silent Sense,” 58th annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), Pittsburg, October 31-November 2, 2019.
“The Laboring of Deep Silence: ‘Conceptless Opening(s), the Suspension of the Familiar, and the Dismemberment of the Ego,” presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, Fordham University, September 12-14, 2019.
“Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits of Voice,” presented at Diverse Lineages of Existentialism II, Washington DC, June 3-5, 2019.
2018
“Decolonizing Silence: On the Coloniality of Silence and Silent Sense,” 57th annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), State College, October 18-20, 2018 (unable to attend for personal reasons).
“Silence and a Lived Metaphysics of Radical Contingency: Commentary on Invited Symposium: Merleau-Ponty and 21stCentury Science: Nature, Agency, and Being,” presented at the Pacific American Philosophical Association (APA), San Diego, March 28-Apil 1, 2018.
2017
“Poietic Transspatiality: Merleau-Ponty, Normativity, and the Latent Sens of Nature,” presented at the 42th Annual Meeting of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, Albuquerque, November 2-4, 2017.
“The Silence of Excess: Nietzsche, “Woman,” and the Fecund Limits of Self-Overcoming,” presented at the 56th annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), Memphis, October 19-21, 2017.
“Poietic Transspatiality: Merleau-Ponty, Normativity, and the Latent Sens of Nature,” presented at the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, Toronto, September 29-October 1, 2017.
“Poietic Transspatiality: Merleau-Ponty and the Sens of Nature,” presented at the Pacific American Philosophical Association (APA), Seattle, April 12-15, 2017.
2016
“A Tale of Fear: Racialization and Temporal Oppression in Coates’ Between the World and Me,” presented at the 55th annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), Salt Lake City, October 20-22, 2016.
“An-Archic Past: Rethinking Negativity with Bergson,” presented at the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, Halifax, September 29-October 1, 2016.
“Merleau-Ponty’s and Irigaray’s Interlocking Lips: On Female Anatomy and Pleasure,” presented at the 10th annual conference of philoSOPHIA, Denver, March 11-12, 2016.
“Toward a Philosophical Unison: Mary Parker Follett’s Relational Ontology,” presented at the 2016 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP), Portland, March 4-6, 2016
“The Lesbian Style,” presented at the Central American Philosophical Association (APA), Chicago, March 3, 2016.
2015
“Transgressive Freedom: On Beauvoir’s Hegelian Philosophy of Action,” presented at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Philosophical Society (SWPS), Nashville, November 6-8, 2015.
“The Immemorial Time of Gender: Merleau-Ponty’s Polymorphic Matrix of Original Past,” presented at the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, Montreal, October 29-31, 2015.
“The Lesbian Style,” presented at the U.S. Midwest Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), Chestertown, October 7-9, 2015.
“The Immemorial Time of Gender: Merleau-Ponty’s Polymorphic Matrix of Original Past,” presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle: The Twenty-First Century Body: Thinking Merleau-Ponty In and Out of Time, Worcester, October 1-3, 2015.
2013
“Unreflexive Medicine: The Unspoken ‘Goodness’ of the Normal in the Case of Conjoined Twins’ Separation,” presented at the 14th Annual Michigan State University Graduate Conference in Philosophy on “Power, Oppression, and Social Change,” Lansing, March 28-29, 2013.
CV Title
Invited Talks
2020
Workshop on “Feminist Perspectives on Sexual Violence,” John Carroll University, Cleveland, Ohio, April 19, 2020.
Colloquium Series on “Critical Feminist Phenomenology of Time – Haunting: The Past in the Future,” University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, February 20, 2020.
2018
“Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits of Voice,” Gender I Seksualność w polskiej nauce I praktyce spolecnej, Istytut Filozofii I Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Warsaw, Poland, October 10, 2018.
2016
Seminar on Merleau-Ponty and Gender, Concordia University, February 29, 2016.
Teaching
Solo Teaching
As Instructor at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
Cultural Diversity (PHIL 216) Fall 2019
Medical Ethics (PHIL 335) Summer 2019
Decolonial Feminism (WGS 351) Summer 2018
Global Justice (PHIL 309) Fall 2017
Human Nature (PHIL 110) Spring 2017
Ethics (PHIL 102) Winter 2017; Spring 2018
Philosophy of Love and Sex (PHIL 170) Fall 2016
Feminist Philosophy (PHIL 315) Winter 2016
As Adjunct Instructor at American University, Washington, DC
Do the Right Thing (PHIL 102) Fall 2020
Western Philosophy (PHIL 105) Spring 2014
Moral Philosophy (PHIL 220) Fall 2013; Spring 2014
Teaching Assistant
As Graduate Employee at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
Humanities II (HUM 102) Dr. Laskaya Winter 2021
World Religions: Asian Tradition (REL 101), Dr. Unno Fall 2020
19th Century Philosophy (PHIL 312), Dr. Marren Spring 2020
Logic (PHIL 225), Dr. Brence Winter 2020
Environmental Philosophy (PHIL 340), Dr. Brence Winter 2018
Philosophy of Film (PHIL 322), Dr. Brence Spring 2016
Feminist Philosophy (PHIL 315), Dr. Stocker Fall 2015
Philosophy of Love and Sex (PHIL 170), Dr. Mann Spring 2015
Ethics (PHIL 102), Dr. Alfano Winter 2015
Human Nature (PHIL 110), Dr. Morar Fall 2014