Born and raised in Toronto, I am a political theorist who now calls New York City home. Currently, I am a Lecturer at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY.

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I received my Honours Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Toronto, where I graduated with high distinction, and where I first kindled my love for political thought. I have always been motivated by questions of self-knowledge, interested not only in who and what we are but also in how our answers to these questions shape our ethical and political lives, and in political theory I found a natural intellectual home.

 
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Following this, I then completed my Master’s Degree at York University in the interdisciplinary Social and Political Thought Program, where I first discovered the work of Søren Kierkegaard. One of political theory’s most enduring metaphors is that of Plato’s cave, and in Kierkegaard’s thought I found a comprehensive account of our journey to the truth, and one that, along with Plato, recognized that in this journey we’re often our own worst enemies. Consequently, I wrote my Master’s thesis on the problem of self-deception, exploring the ways that we resist the truth, be that truth personal or political.

 
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After my Master’s Degree, I then moved to New York City where I completed my PhD in Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and where I specialized in political thought. Drawn to CUNY because of its outstanding faculty, it was there that I worked with my mentor Marshall Berman, the widely celebrated intellectual who shaped how we think about questions of modernism, modernity, and urbanism. Writing my dissertation on Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx, I was motivated by the way that political theorists take for granted an audience receptive to their critiques of injustice, without acknowledging that our willingness and ability to recognize and confront injustice requires a prior personal transformation too. My work therefore demonstrated that positive political change requires not only the critical tools to challenge our objective reality, but more importantly, it requires the critical individuals with the desire to do so. And without an understanding of how these individuals come about—an understanding that my work provides—social and political critique remains an empty project because it falls on deaf ears.

 
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Following my PhD, I first worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University before becoming a Senior Research Fellow at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. Currently, I am a Lecturer at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY.

 

Lastly, when not engaged in teaching and research, you can often find me indulging my love of travel and the arts. I also happen to be an avid practitioner of the Japanese artform of bonsai, so you just might find me out in nature looking for inspiration, or else at home, working on my little trees.