Publications
"Addictive Craving: There’s More to Wanting More." Philosophy, Psychology, & Psychiatry (forthcoming).
The phenomenon of craving is widely taken to be a key feature of addiction, commonly appealed to in order to explain how addiction jeopardizes self-control, intentions, resolutions, and choice. The received view of craving is a neurobiological account which defines cravings as intense urges that result from reward-learning. I will argue this view misidentifies the content of addictive craving and fails to capture its phenomenology. I propose an alternative explanation according to which addictive cravings are psychologically complex desires aiming at emotionally significant experiences that are highly valued in the context of addiction. This helps explain why cravings are so intense and often extremely difficult to resist.
"What’s Wrong with the (White) Female Nude?" The Polish Journal of Aesthetics 41(2), 2016.
In “What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?” A. W. Eaton argues that the female nude in Western art promotes sexually objectifying, heteronormative erotic taste, and thereby has insidious effects on gender equality. In this response, I reject the claim that sexual objectification is a phenomenon that can be generalized across the experiences of all women. In particular, I argue that Eaton’s thesis is based on the experiences of women who are white, and does not pay adequate attention to the lives of nonwhite women. This act of exclusion undermines the generality of Eaton’s thesis, and exposes a more general bias in discussions of female representations in art. Different kinds of bodies have been subjected to different kinds of objectifying construal, and the ethics of nudity in art must be extended to take such variation into account.
In Progress
I am currently working on a paper which argues that sexual desire cannot be defined by a universal object, which stands in contrast to the most cited articles on the topic. I show that sexual desire is not a natural kind, but rather, a social kind.
Awards & Fellowships
2019 Graduate Assistantship, Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI), Penn State University, Rock Ethics Institute
2018 Graduate Student Travel Award, Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology
2016-2019 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship