Philosophy Department Faculty

I specialize in German Idealism and phenomenology. Before joining Boston College, I held research fellowships in Germany, Italy, and Ireland, where I taught phenomenology, existentialism, post-Kantian philosophy, and philosophy and literature. Since 2020, I have been serving in the editorial collective of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology.

My research is twofold: I am currently working on issues and themes pertaining to Hegel's philosophy and the phenomenology of intersubjective experience. Concerning the latter strand of research, I have recently co-authored the monograph "Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction" (Polity 2022), and published several articles that uncover the dimension of social sensitivity in Husserl's phenomenology. By and large, my interest in phenomenology concerns the relation between habit, attention, and affect, and how they are involved in engendering empathetic attitudes that do not fall into the standard paradigm of "direct perception" of other minds.

With regard to my research on Hegel, I am currently working on a monograph on the life of the mind in Hegel's philosophy, which is concerned, among other themes, with the primacy of memory in Hegel's theory of subjectivity and its ethical implications. In general, I am interested in the possibilities and scope of dialectical ethics, and particularly in the role of dialectical thinking in foreshadowing and addressing the challenges of alienation and objectification.