I am associate professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy, affiliate faculty in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch and the Center for Early Modern History, as well as a resident fellow and executive committee member of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, all at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In the discipline at large, I am a member of the Steering Committee of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science (HOPOS), and chair of the Midwest Study Group of the North American Kant Society (NAKS).
I earned my PhD in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine in 2014. After that, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at University of Salzburg and spent one year as assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at University of Central Arkansas. During the 2019–2020 academic year, I was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in the Seminar for Philosophy at Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany.
My main research project right now is writing a history of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science (MCPS), which was founded in 1953 as the first center specifically focused on philosophy of science in North America. I've been especially interested in the how philosophy was done at MCPS and how its institutional model was exported to other institutions (such as the Pittsburgh Center for Philosophy of Science and the Indiana University History and Philosophy of Science Department). Likewise, I'm examining the research achievements of these early years of MCPS, including Herbert Feigl's semantic realism, Paul Meehl's theory of construct validity, and Grover Maxwell's structural realism. These days I've also been thinking about the philosophy of contemporary conservation science, especially conceptual issues related to the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems and the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology.
Feel free to peruse my website and to check out my PhilPeople profile! You can contact me via email (mcnu0074 -at- umn.edu) with any questions or comments. I'd happily send copies of my papers if you can't otherwise access them!