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I received my BA in Philosophy from McMaster University and my MA from the University of Ottawa. I attended University of Oxford for my DPhil in Philosophy under the supervision of Derek Parfit, Quassim Cassam, and Paul Snowdon. I taught at Oxford for several years before returning to Canada to take up my current post at Laurier.
My areas of research include: personal identity theory; the metaphysics and value of death; illness; narrative views of the self; memory, trauma, and literary works touching on some of these themes (e.g. the works of W.G. Sebald, and poetry and literature pertaining to death). I have current research projects on the fear of death, and on the perils of longevity.
- Royal Institute of Philosophy U.K. Jacobsen Fellowship.
- Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Scholarship.
- Commonwealth Scholarship.
- Humanities Medal for Special Achievement (McMaster University).
I have research opportunities for graduate students interested in personal identity, the self, narrative, the metaphysics and value of death, and issues surrounding human longevity.
- 'Depressing Goings-on in the House of Actuality: Philosophers and Poets Confront Larkin's "Aubade",' Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 21.1 (2023)
- 'The Future is Not What it Used to Be: Longevity and the Curmudgeonly Attitude to Change,' Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51.8 (2021/22)
- 'Death in Mind: Life, Meaning and Mortality,' in Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, Cholbi and Timmerman, eds. New York: Routledge, 2020.
- 'Unmoored: Mortal Harm and Mortal Fear,' Philosophical Papers 48.2 (2019).
- 'Narrative Aversion: Challenges for the Illness Narrative Advocate,' Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42.1 (2017).
- 'Learning to be Dead: Narrative and the Problem of Mortality,' in Immortality and the Philosophy of Death, Cholbi, ed. Chicago: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.
- 'The Senses of an Ending,' in Narrative, Identity and the Kierkegaardian Self, Lippitt and Stokes, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
- 'Whole Lives and Good Deaths,' Metaphilosophy 45.3 (2014).
- 'Hirsch, Sebald, and the Uses and Limits of Postmemory,' in The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film, Ty and Kilbourn, eds. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2013
- 'Reasons to Live Versus Reasons not to Die,' Think 28.10 (2011).
- 'Scraping Down the Past: Memory and Amnesia in W.G. Sebald's Anti-narrative,' Philosophy and Literature 34.2 (2010).
- 'A Special Way of Being Afraid,' Philosophical Psychology 23.5 (2010).
- 'Reasons to be Fearful: Strawson, Death, and Narrative,' Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 60 (2007).
- 'Impersonal Identity and Corrupting Concepts,' Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (2005).
- 'The New Neo-Kantian and Reductionist Debate,' Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (2003).
- 'Despair, Liberation, and Everyday Life,' Richmond Journal of Philosophy 5 (2003).