Department of Philosophy and Religion

Research and Teaching Summary

My research and teaching focus on the aesthetics of subjectivization—the sensible, affective procedures and processes through which one becomes individuated and recognized as a subject within the social. I am especially interested in the aesthetics of race, gender, and disability and the ways that these different experiences of subjectivity (or being ‘othered’) determine how individuals appear—or fail to appear—as subjects within social spaces, particularly within institutions. Consequently, I engage with artistic, philosophical, and social practices aimed at disrupting those established forms of sensibility that keep existing relations of power in place. I situate my work at the intersections of philosophy and those fields that actively reflect on the relationship between theory and practice: critical race theory, feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis.

My book The Scene of the Voice: Thinking Language after Affect (SUNY Press, Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 2023) investigates the figure of the voice in the work of Martin Heidegger and its reception in contemporary French thought, including the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Maurice Blanchot, and Gilles Deleuze.

I am currently working on my next book project, which I have tentatively titled “For a Digital Philosophy of Race.” This book brings together my work in aesthetics, philosophy of race, and data and information ethics to argue that “the digital” is not a technological concept, but an aesthetic one.

Courses that I regularly offer at Appalachian State include PHL 3050 Philosophy of Race and PHL 3030 Feminist Philosophy. I am also an affiliated faculty member with the Program in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Appalachian State and a visiting faculty member with the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City.

Education

PhD Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture (PIC), Binghamton University, 2007

Whitney Museum of Art Independent Study Program, 1999-2000

Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria, 1998-99

University of Vienna, Comparative Literature, Vienna, Austria, 1998-99

MA Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture (PIC), Binghamton University, 1997

BA Philosophy & Anthropology, Binghamton University, 1994

Oxford University, Philosophy and Socio-Cultural Anthropology, Hertford College, 1993

Fellowships and Awards

Shula Chair in Philosophy, John Carroll University, 2016-18

Summer Course Development Grant, Catholic Studies, John Carroll University, 2016

Duke Women’s Studies Ford Foundation Interdisciplinary Course Development Grant, Spring 2016

Grauel Faculty Research Fellowship, John Carroll University, Spring 2014

Summer Research Fellowship, John Carroll University, 2011

NEH Summer Seminar Visiting Scholar, “Shanghai and Berlin: Cultures of Urban Modernism in Interwar China and Germany,” Stanford University, 2010

Fulbright Fellow, Vienna, Austria, 1998-99

Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies, Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studies Program, 1999-2000

DAAD Language-study Scholarship, Sprachintensiv Kurs am Herder Institut der Universität Leipzig, 1995

Selected Publications

Books

• The Scene of the Voice: Thinking Language After Affect (SUNY Press, Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 2023)
  

Textbook/Reader

• Co-author with Dan Bucsescu of Looking Beyond the Structure: Critical Thinking for Designers and Architects (New York: Fairchild Books, 2009)

Selected Journal Articles

• “Diversity Work and the Narcissisms of Affective Exits.” Feminist Formations 31.1 (Spring 2019). Special Issue on Critical Feminist Exits, Re-Routings, and Institutional Betrayals in Academia.
• “Lights! Race! Gender! Adrian Piper and the Pseudorationality of Data.” Feminist Media Histories 3.3. Special Issue: Data. (Summer 2017).
• “The Sonic Turn and Theory’s Affective Call.” parallax. Special Issue: Sounding/Thinking. 23.3 (July 2017).
• “Deterritorialising Transversality: The Antagonism of the Object between Deleuze and Guattari.” parallax. Special Issue: Philosophy without an Object. 21.4 (2015).
• “Art and the Heideggerian Repression: Rancière, Nancy, and a Communism of the Image.” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 5.1 (Spring 2013).
• “From an Aesthetics of the Real to the Reality of the Aesthetic: Rancière, Sick, and the Politics of Sound Art.” Leonardo Music Journal 23 (2013). Special Issue on Sound Art. [reprinted in Haroon Mirza (Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin, Ireland, 2014)]
• “Institutional Schizophasia and the Possibility of the Humanities’ ‘Other Scene’: Guattari and the Exigency of Transversality.” Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 180–204. Special Issue on Félix Guattari in the Age of Semiocapitalism.

Selected Essays in Collections

• “Genealogy,” Keyword for Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies—Volume II, ed. Catherine M. Orr and Ann Braithwaite (Routledge/Taylor and Francis, forthcoming 2022)

• “Philosophy’s Mother Envy: Theory, Affect, and the Possibility of Deconstructing the Mother Tongue,” in Untying the Mother Tongue, ed. Federico Dal Bo and Antonio Castore (Berlin: ICI Berlin, forthcoming 2022)

• “Theory’s Affective Scene: Or, What to Do with Affect after Language,” in Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language, ed. Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve (Routledge, 2019)
• “Teaching The Matrix and Unlearning the Racial Organization of Knowledge,” in Race, Philosophy, and Film, ed. Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Dan Flory (New York: Routledge, 2013).
• “Reforming Vengeance: Kung Fu and the Racial Melancholia of Chinese Masculinity,” The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, ed. Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• “The Metaphysical Mouth: Charles Bernstein and Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Language,” in The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein, edited by William Allegrezza (London: Salt Publications, 2012), 35-54.
• “‘Every name in history is I’: Bachmann’s Anti-Archive,” in If We Had the Word: Ingeborg Bachmann, Views and Reviews, ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler, (Ariadne Press, 2004)
• “Numéro un et Numéro deux: It was Outside, the Rejection of the Image,” in I said I love. That is the promise: The tvideo politics of Jean-Luc Godard, Gareth James & Florian Zeyfang, eds. øjeblikket/b_books: Critical Readers in Visual Cultures #4 (Berlin: b_books, 2003)