In Fall 2024 I will be starting as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, the University of Cambridge. I hold a BA from Harvard and an MA and joint degree PhD from the Committee on Social Thought and the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. 

My first book, What Are Children For?​ On Ambivalence and Choice, co-authored with Rachel Wiseman was published in June, 2024. The book analyses the increasing ambivalence about having children and explores the philosophical resources available to overcome it. Peeling back the layers of resistance, What Are Children For? argues that when we make the individual decision whether or not to have children we confront a profound philosophical question, that of the goodness of our form life itself. How can we justify perpetuating human life given the catastrophic harm and suffering of which we are always at once both victims and perpetrators? To meet this challenge we must, we argue, uncover a capacity to grasp the fundamental goodness of human life—not only theoretically but practically in the actual lives we lead today.

My more narrowly academic research lies at the intersection of contemporary moral philosophy (metaethics, moral psychology, procreation ethics and population ethics) and the history of moral philosophy, especially Kant and post-Kantian German Idealism (but also Aristotle and Heidegger). The central question guiding my research is how best to understand the nature of our dependence on conditions that lie beyond our individual rational control and choice—our emotions, our character and other persons. My aim is to show that these forms of dependence are not restrictions on human freedom but are rather the  conditions for its realization.  

Finally, I am a senior editor of The Point, a magazine of philosophical writing on politics, contemporary life, and culture, and co-founder of the Point Program for Public Thinking, a collaboration of the magazine with the University of Chicago to promote a more thoughtful public discourse.

My essays and critical reviews have appeared in The New York Times​, The Atlantic, The TLS, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, and The Point.