About

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Data & Decision Sciences at Emory University, where I work with Alexander Tolbert. I received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rutgers University in 2025, under the supervision of Elisabeth Camp. My dissertation committee was greatly enriched by Andy Egan, Alex Guerrero, Jeffrey King, and Ethan Nowak. Before Rutgers, I received my B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago, where my thesis advisor was Malte Willer. I also spent one year at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

My research examines how linguistic variation encodes social meaning, drawing on tools from pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and the philosophy of language. I’m particularly interested in how differences in accent, dialect, or style function as cues for social inference and how these mechanisms can generate bias in algorithmic systems that process language. My current work, motivated by the problem of linguistic profiling, investigates how social meaning can be modeled formally using game-theoretic pragmatics. I’m also exploring how the socially meaningful dimensions of language, often described as indexical fields in sociolinguistics, might correspond to the distributional structures that organize meaning in large language model embedding spaces.

More generally, I'm interested in how linguistic form may shape or constrain thought, and how the connection between language and cognition intersects with social and historical structures. This work brings together three often-separate traditions: (i) empirical research on linguistic form and social cognition, (ii) studies of linguistic relativity, and (iii) critical and postcolonial theories of linguistic oppression and loss. Aside from philosophy of language and linguistics, I am fascinated by Indigenous metaphysics and ecofeminism. 

Outside of philosophy, I enjoy gardening, herbalism, reading literature, and baking. I also love having philosophical discussions with non-philosophers. Some of my greatest insights have come from my brother Nick, a computer scientist, my twin sister Natalie, a (real) writer, and my friend Annie, an herbalist and farmer. The best fiction book that I've read recently is The Overstory by Richard Powers. I grew up in Chicago, but a year spent living in Perry County, Kentucky before college offered my first deep encounter with linguistic difference and the social dynamics of speech.