I am a philosopher living in my home state of California. I specialize in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, with a concentration in Feminist Philosophy and Disability Studies, and an interest in medicine and the sciences of the mind.

I currently am a Lecturer at Stanford University. I was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University starting in 2014, until moving to California in 2018.

I received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2011. My dissertation was entitled "Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adverbialist Theory of Mind" (Sean Kelly, chair, along with Daniel Dennett, Richard Moran, Susanna Siegel). I held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute from 2011-2013. I have been a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Social Sciences in Princeton, New Jersey, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

My research centers on embodiment, where attention to bodily existence offers novel solutions to established philosophical problems. I have written about motor intentionality, practical knowledge, the perception of space, the relationship between neurophenomenology and neurophilosophy, and the norms of sex and gender.

I recently finished a booklength manuscript that addresses the question of what lesion studies tell us about normal life. The working title is Substitutions and Detours: What We Learn About the Normal From the Pathological. In my book, I describe the role that neuropsychology plays in academic and popular thought, where rare syndromes and disorders are pressed into service as a means of disclosing truths about our minds, our relations to others, and our place in the world. I present a critique and reconstruction of the current best practices in neuropsychology through the reinterpretation of well-known human lesion studies. I analyze the strange history and contemporary meanings of ‘the normal’ and ‘the pathological.’ I address moral issues of harm and exploitation that haunt the field. And I use the resulting surprises and insights to develop a new concept of mind.

Recent Courses

PHI 194J: Other Minds

PHI 134B/234B: The Normal and the Pathological

PHI 186/286: Philosophy of Mind

PHI 132/232: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception

PHI 134A/234A: Animals

PHI 134/234: Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations

PHI 85: Philosophy of Medicine