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I am friendly!

... but faceblind. 

If I seem to ignore you, it is because I do not recognises faces. Please say hi. 

As soon as a conversation ends, I do not recognise people, even five minutes later. Please don't take this personally!
I love chatting to anyone, including former and current students, where'er we meet. I would greatly appreciate it if you remind me how we know each other, so we can chat.

Announcements

Bio

I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy and GSS (Gender and Sexuality Studies) at Tulane University. This is a dual appointment. Before that, I was an Associate Professor at University of Tennessee, the Andrew Fraser Junior Research Fellow at St. John's College (Oxford University), a Research Fellow at the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

My doctorate is from Rutgers University. My doctoral research received Rutgers University's highest student prize, the Distinguished Scholarly Achievement Award. I later received the UK's Royal Institute of Philosophy's Essay Prize and Canada's Killam Fellowship (declined, to accept Oxford's Andrew Fraser Fellowship). 

In 2022 I received the Chancellor's Notable Woman Award from the University of Tennessee and was listed in the 40-under-40 list for East Tennessee. In 2023 I received the Provost's Early Career Research Award. 

I am an associate editor at Law & Philosophy. I founded the Coursier-Cross Library. My Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath number is 14 or less.*

Outside of academia, I am interested in physical, creative, and healing arts. I lead various kinds of fitness and physio activity, especially acro-balance. I perform with Dragonfly Circus and One World Circus and I facilitate Knoxville Acro Jams. I sometimes model and dance for artists and creative media.

In 2022-2024, I ran a countercultural community space called the Playhouse. It nurtures community, collaboration, public philosophy, and the arts. Its raison d'etre is a space for adults to be playful.

I grew up in the woods near Orford, Suffolk. I have a country-girl soul. After twenty one years of city living, I still feel like a delighted alien in urban spaces. I now live in New Orleans, which is especially delightful. I'm 'first gen' for university and for completing high school. As an applied epistemologist who aims to form pathways between the campus, the city, and the wild, being 'first gen' is probably an advantage.  

Research Overview

I specialise in epistemology, meta-philosophy, and social philosophy. My research areas include virtue epistemology, epistemic value, epistemic luck, the ethics of belief, the nature of understanding and explanation, the epistemic power of attention and doubt, how to model statistical inference and epistemic risk, and the relationships between base rates and judgements about individuals. 

I have projects on the epistemology of attention, self-deception, rape, trauma, love, sexuality, evidence law, and legal proof. I have side interests in the philosophy of self-harm, sex work, sex witchcraft, and circus. 

I am fascinated by how language shapes how people gather and constrains community flourishing, including within academia. Academic philosophy can learn a lot from listening to the countercultures. 

Back to the mainstream: I examine how normality conditions, proper functioning, and the concept-conception distinction affect philosophical methodology. I develop a ‘relevant alternatives framework’ approach to epistemic phenomena, including legal proof, corroboration, and justified belief; and I highlight the epistemic significance of social phenomena such as gaslighting, conspiracy theories, collective attention, and conceptual innovation on what individuals should believe. 

I defend a ‘purist’ epistemology, which holds that moral factors don’t affect epistemic justification; I do so by drawing attention to the 'breadth of epistemic normativity': That is, the many interactions between moral and epistemic phenomena that are consistent with purism. 

See the research page for cheat sheets, overviews, and essays. 

Prospective Graduate Students

I am very happy to work with doctoral students. I guide students on a range of topics, including epistemology, meta-philosophy, and some aspects of sex and relationships. I am especially well-suited to projects in social epistemology (incl. applied epistemology and legal epistemology), virtue epistemology, the ethics of belief, the normativity of attention, philosophy of sexual violence, and philosophical methodology.

Please see the "key words" section at the top of my CV, my essays overview, or explore this website to further a better sense of my research interests.

Tulane is particularly strong in social and political philosophy and in philosophy of mind. Here are the faculty lists for Philosophy and Gender & Sexuality Studies. (I have a dual appointment.) Students can also benefit from Tulane's Newcomb Institute, which focuses on gender, and Tulane's Murphy Institute, which includes the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs and other centres for research on law and policy. Graduate students can pursue the graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. 

Note that if you have a left-field, non-standard idea for doctoral studies -- a project on philosophy of polyamory, kink, magick, sex work*, dance, philosophy through art, the emotions of climate change, the art of gathering, philosophy of personal life experience, or some other creative or countercultural endeavour -- Tulane could be a great place for this. New Orleans is a fantastic, mind-inspiring place to live, and the faculty is open-minded and supportive. I have a dual appointment across two departments, and my colleagues are experts in emotions, cog sci, society, sex, and many other topics. Tulane University supports cross-disciplinary, art-based, and city-engaged projects. So I think there are various avenues to expand what philosophy can be. Note that I need to coordinate with my colleagues about this, and so no promises! Contact me if this appeals, and we can talk. As noted above, my main research remains within mainstream analytic epistemology.

Application information for the MA and PhD is here.

For updates about my wonderful students, go here. 
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* Re. Sex work projects. That topic is not new; I mean an unusual perspective or stance, such as combining philosophy of sex work with ethnography of the city, for example, or the aesthetics of stripping. That is, the kinds of philosophy questions about sex work that arise when people stop blurring their vision with distracting ethical handwringing.

Non-Research Sessions for Academics

1.) During colloquia visits and some workshops, I can also present an informal and irreverent session called "Work Skills, Distilled: A Year of Productivity Training in n Minutes". It is a condensed, distilled version of many, many hours of productivity trainings. The content can be adapted for sessions of various lengths (i.e., 30-75 minutes). The presentation covers time management strategies, goal setting, planning, kinds of accountability group, "work-life balance", and similar. 

2.) In informal academic settings I can lead "Pre-Hab for Academics", a 25-minute demonstration of simple, effective stretches for neck and shoulder health. It simplifies recent developments in kinesthesiology, to help academics protect their neck and shoulders from the damage of desk work. 

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*For Bacon, I'm in a film with Christopher Lee. For Black Sabbath, I performed with Rising Appalachia, who performed with Ani DiFranco. The chain is Prince-Stevie Nicks-Dave Walker. For Erdos, the quickest route is via mathematician Brian Zaharatos.