I am Professor of Philosophy and affiliate professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Texas Tech University. I am a TTU "Integrated Scholar" honoree for excellence in research, teaching, and service. 

I serve on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Aesthetics and the Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry book series, and as the aesthetics editor for Daimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía, published by the University of Murcia in Spain. I was a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics from 2017 to 2020.

I have been a fellow at the National Humanities Center and at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. I have visited at the University of Vienna as a professor and at the University of Barcelona as a Woodrow Wilson/Mellon Foundation fellow.

I was recently interviewed by the newly established Washington University Review of Philosophy.

Research

I specialize in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. My research has been largely devoted to carving out a 'philosophy of poetry' within aesthetics (now a reality). Most of my publications are available via my Research Gate and PhilPeople pages.

Beautiful Speech: The Nature, Origins, and Powers of Poetry is under contract with Oxford University Press and soon to be completed. It has been funded by fellowships from the Mellon and Woodrow Wilson Foundations and the National Humanities Center.

The Philosophy of Poetry and Literature, for the Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy Series, is also under contract.

I edited and contributed to The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics (2012; PB 2015).

Recent and forthcoming articles and book reviews

• • 'Poesía', to appear in the online encyclopedia of the Sociedad Española de Filosofía Analítica, Estética y Teoría de las Artes, edited by María José Alcaraz and Paca Pérez Carreño (in Spanish; commissioned).

  • Review of The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Elisabeth Camp, to appear in the British Journal of Aesthetics (commissioned).

  • 'The Gift of the Lyric', The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition (Research in Aesthetics Series), edited by Julia Langkau and Patrik Engisch (Routledge 2022).

  • 'Love, Death and Life's Summum Bonum: The Before Trilogy as Memento Mori', The Philosophy of Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, edited by Hans Maes and Katrien Schaubroeck (Routledge 2021).

  • Review of Opposite: Poems, Philosophy and Coffee, Helen Mort and Aaron Meskin, author and editor (Scarborough, UK: Valley Press, 2019). Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78:2, 2020.

    Recent and forthcoming talks

• 'The Value of Poetry in the Age of A.I.' (keynote)

  • Philosophy of Poetry Conference, University of Genoa, January 2025.

• 'Thinking with Poetry'

  • Bilkent University (English Department), 5 October 2023 (via Zoom).

  • Conference in honor of Peter Lamarque. University of York, 5-6 July 2023 (via Zoom).

• 'Poetic Powers: A Theory of Tropes'

  • University of Murcia, 8 June 2022.

  • University of Barcelona/LOGOS Research Group Colloquium Series, 25 May 2022.

  • Words, Voices, Bodies - Workshop in Philosophy of Poetry, 11-12 January 2022 (online).

• Panelist, The 2022 Artfull Brain conference: Human and Machine Interaction in the Age of AI, 21 February 2022, The Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, Texas Tech University.

Other tidbits

I was awarded the 2016 American Society for Aesthetics Ted Cohen Prize for "The Spoken and the Written: An Ontology of Poems" (in The Philosophy of Poetry, edited by J. Gibson, Oxford University Press 2015).  Here are some reviews of the book that discuss my contribution: Estetika, BJA, JAAC.

In 2014 I defended The Philosophical Importance of Aesthetics in my first contribution to the blogosphere. After a lively debate there, the discussion continued here. The post won the first Ornie Award for Outstanding Guest Post.

According to the people at the The Philosophy Tree, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce are my great-great-great-great-philosophical grandparents, by way of Josiah Royce, C.I. Lewis, Norman Malcolm, Sydney Shoemaker, Kendall Walton, and Jerrold Levinson.