I am especially interested in epistemic justice and clinical ethics consultation. One of the most pressing ethical issues of perception, empathy, and dignity is that we cannot know the phenomenological experience of someone else’s suffering; we do not know what it means to be them, in pain. Disjunction between patients and healthcare practitioners often emerges at the intersection pain and structural injustices that reduce the perceived reliability or accuracy of the person who suffers.
My research focuses on the perception of and ethical responses to pain: what is the lived experience of being in pain? how do we know if someone else is in pain? and what must we do about it? I emphasize the importance of rigorous cultural history, epistemology (how we know what we know, and what it means to know), and axiology (how we value things, and what it means to value), and I endeavor to synthesize analytic philosophy of mind with continental philosophy of embodiment.
List-form Journal Articles & Book Chapters
Pain & Language
2025. and M. J. Fitzgerald. Joseph K. visits the sick house: how the medical humanities require the medical posthumanities. Monash Bioethics Review: online ahead of print.
2023. and S. Tanner. Under Strange and Evil Stars: Ecologies of Pain in Steinbeck’s To A God Unknown. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 30 (1): 179–199.
2023. Second Hand Politics: Sartorial Culture, Socialism, and the Work of the Novel in Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon. Political and Sartorial Styles in Britain and Its Colonies, 1840–1926, edited by Kevin Morrison. Manchester UP. 78–96.
Language & Embodiment
2026 (forthcoming). The “Other” Principle: Justice and the Clinical Ethics Consult Question. American Journal of Bioethics.
2023. Speculative Capital, Speculative Reading: The Materialist Ethics of Fiction in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and The Pickwick Papers. Dickens Studies Annual 54 (3): 121–146.
2023. and S. Tanner. Mapping Feeling: Geography, Affect, and History on the London Streets through Study Abroad. Victorian Culture and Experiential Learning, edited by Kevin Morrison. Palgrave MacMillan. 143–160.
2022. Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy, and Literary Authority. Edinburgh University Press.
2020. False Hair and Paradoxical Performance in The Nether World. Gissing Journal 54 (4): 11.
Epistemology & Embodiment
2026 (forthcoming). The Mechanics of Epistemic Justice: A Response to Toding et al. and their application of my epistemic approach to dignity. Theoretical Medicine & Bioethics. Online ahead of print.
2026. The Double Double-Empathy Problem: The Empathy Deficit and Autistic People’s Moral Experience. Journal of Philosophy of Disability. Online ahead of print.
2025. Epistemic Justice and the Language-Game of Dignity: From Ontology to Ordinary Language Epistemology. Theoretical Medicine & Bioethics. Online ahead of print.
2025. and W. Davis. The Practice of the Pause: Cultivating Reflection as an Intrinsic Good in STEM Ethics Pedagogy. Teaching Ethics. Online ahead of print.
2025. Society must be Self-Defended: Violence, Wilful Ignorance, and the Embodied Habits of Fascism. Martial Arts Studies 18: 52–64.
2024. Movements that Matter: How Martial Arts Studies Can Reframe the Ethics of First-Blush Empathy. Martial Arts Studies 15: 72–83.
2016. Staging the Streets: The Theatricality of Science in fin-de-siècle Martial Arts. Victorian Literature & Culture 22 (3): 399–417.
Pain & Epistemology
Forthcoming. The Mechanics of Pain: Associationism, Motive, and Action in Heart and Science. Science and Literature in the 19th Century, ed. Pamala Gilbert. Palgrave MacMillan.
2026 (forthcoming). and F. Abbasi. When “Good-Enough” Treatment is not Good Enough: Pain-Related Motivational Deficit and Epistemic Deflection in the Treatment of Gynecological Pain. Ken Inst Eth J
2025. ‘I am in pain’: neuroethics, philosophy of language, and the representation of pain. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 46: 13–30.
19th C. Literature and Culture
2017. Redefining the Republic of Letters: The Literary Public and Mudie’s Circulating Library. Journal of Victorian Culture 22 (3): 399–417.
2015. Editor. Victorian Science and Literature, special issue of Critical Survey, 27 (2). Including editor’s introduction, “Victorian Literature and Science: Introduction.” 1–4.
Sample public presentation: