About Me

Teaching is one of the most rewarding aspects of my professional life, and I consider it central to my role as an academic.

I have worked with students for over thirteen years. Between receiving my BA and PhD, I spent two years teaching high school students in Madrid under the funding of the Fulbright Program, after which I worked for two more years as a college preparatory counselor in the Bronx. I earned my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Maryland, where I taught as a graduate instructor. I then received a two-year Visiting Assistant Professorship at Susquehanna University where I served as full-time faculty. I am currently a Visiting Block Professor at Colorado College.

In my time as an educator, I have seen philosophical training provide students of every background with crucial skills, including stronger intellectual and emotional empathy, improved critical thinking and careful reasoning, and clearer communication. These are uniquely empowering tools, especially for those who are otherwise marginalized. My aim as a teacher is to ensure that all of my students—both those who are prepared and secure in their abilities, and those who are not—feel welcome to philosophy and see its usefulness in their lives. By establishing classrooms that emphasize collaboration rather than competition, making philosophy personally meaningful for those who are not yet gripped by abstract theory, and modeling my own philosophical process, I hope to do just that.

My research focuses primarily on philosophy of mind and its intersection with aesthetics and moral psychology. This work is largely interdisciplinary. By drawing from both traditional philosophy and contemporary research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, my goal is to explore the implications of empirical findings in areas that are of philosophical interest. My dissertation, What Emotion Does: Affect in Empathy, Art, and Beyond, for instance, aims to resolve several questions about the nature of emotion—or, as it is more broadly construed, affect. These include questions about affect’s motivational role, its representational content, appropriate standards of rationality, and how it interacts with other cognitive systems to produce e.g. empathy, aesthetic appreciation, and understanding.

Before starting my graduate program, I was a Rotary Scholar in Michoacán, Mexico, and studied Philosophy at Smith College, a small, vibrant liberal arts college for women in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Areas of Specialization

Philosophy of Mind (with emphasis on Philosophy of Emotion), Moral Psychology, Aesthetics

Areas of Competence

Ethics, Philosophy of Cognitive Science