What was your dissertation title and topic?

Freedom’s Spontaneity

What seminar stood out and influenced your thinking?

Barbara Herman’s seminar on Kant’s 3rd Critique

What, if anything, about the UCLA department’s culture and approach to philosophy has influenced your intellectual approach?

One of the features of the UCLA department for which I am now most grateful is that I wasn’t rushed to finish my PhD too fast, and I was encouraged to tackle big questions and undertake ambitious research projects rather than publishing as quickly as possible. I hope I have absorbed much of this approach in my own work.

If your current career is inside of academia, what’s your favorite course to teach right now? Do you have a recent publication you’d like to mention?

I taught Philosophy in Literature last spring at UCLA, which was a blast. We discussed the nature of happiness, freedom, and the role of art in a good life.

I recently published “Remixing Rawls: Constitutional Cultural Liberties in Liberal Democracies” in the Northeastern University Law Review, which is the start of a big project on the political philosophy of cultural production and participation.

Any all-time favorite philosophical articles or books you would recommend? Any new discoveries?

Some of my all time favorites are the Symposium, Descartes’ Meditations, Kant’s 3rd Critique, Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, Beauvoir’s Second Sex, and Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population. Recently, I’ve been reading Rahel Jaeggi’s Alienation.