Bio

Howdy! Welcome to a short biography to give you a little background about me.

A life-long Midwesterner, I grew up in the Cincinnati suburbs and attended the University of Cincinnati for my B.A. From there, I hopped over to Iowa for graduate school, earning my doctorate from the University of Iowa in 2012. As a child, I also spent a fair amount of time in the green mountains of Vermont, which has given me a love of the outdoors and made it plain to me that I would one day find myself living far from the Midwestern farms of my youth.

Currently, I am a visiting assistant professor of Philosophy & Humanities at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which department I joined in 2015. I moved to Alaska in 2013 for unrelated reasons—mostly looking for a new adventure—and spent some time working as a bank teller, a technical publications writer, and an IT technician before making my way back to academia. I have also at various times been an academic editor, a barista, and a bartender.

In my spare time, my overwhelming joy is in being out in the wilds of Alaska, hiking and camping in the backcountry. I also like to keep my technological skills active and am often investing my time in some new IT project or other. Apart from that, I have a great appreciation for science fiction & fantasy literature, craft cocktails, and coffee—I am always on the lookout for good examples with which to satisfy my palate. I also have a fairly developed traveling bug, which has over the years taken me to locales far and wide.

In my professional life, my focus is on early modern philosophy, particularly the metaphysics of Leibniz and the metaethics of Hume. However, as is unsurprising with such historical role models, my interests in philosophy are fairly all-encompassing. I am passionate about my teaching, and I love getting students engaged in philosophical thinking, especially those students who don't think of themselves as being naturally interested in philosophy. One of my favorite philosophical topics for discussion and research is the nature of possibility, especially as it relates to the sticky issues of free will and normativity.