As an instructor, I am committed to high-quality pedagogy whose foundation is attention to creating spaces where all students see their contributions as philosophers and scholars as valuable.
At Wittenberg, I teach courses in ethics, epistemology, and feminist philosophy (cross listed in Women's Studies), in addition to Logic and other introductory courses.
At the University of Rochester, I spent several years as a Dudley Doust Fellow teaching interdisciplinary writing courses with philosophical themes. I have also taught Introduction to Ethics at the University of Rochester and the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
What are good reasons like? Do I know anything at all? When do I need to do my own research, and when should I rely on others? In this course, we'll explore traditional issues in epistemology including knowledge, justification, and skepticism, and also social and applied epistemic issues raised by our communal involvement in the internet, including the epistemology of disagreement, testimony, conspiracy theories, and the impact of echo chambers and algorithms on our epistemic community. We will engage through writing, revision, and in-class discussion to dive deeply into these issues and consider the contemporary challenges we face to knowledge and rational belief.
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In this course, we use feminist philosophy to explore the ways that gender shapes experiences of oppression, and adds a lens to better understand our world, including the nature of gender, the way we transmit information and knowledge within communities, the nature of scientific practice, medical practice, and other aspects of our lived experiences. Students will engage with these issues through class discussion and through argumentative writing assignments.
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This class covers contemporary issues and debates in bioethics. Topics may include abortion, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, euthanasia, autonomy, paternalism, use of human subjects in research, access to health care, allocation of scarce resources and environmental ethics.
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This class serves as an introduction to philosophical methodology and covers questions such as: do we have free will? Are we living in a simulation, and how would we know? Are our minds reducible to our brains? How does the internet affect what we can and can’t know? What are we morally obligated to do (if anything)? Is it permissible to eat animals? Whose duty is it to mitigate climate change? In familiarizing ourselves with these questions, students will engage with a wide variety of philosophers and sharpen their skills in argumentative writing.
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An introduction to logic that includes content in critical thinking, informal fallacies, and in formal systems, typically including categorical logic, sentential logic, and/or predicate logic.
At the University of Nebraska-Omaha
A critical study of basic moral concepts and problems contained in ethical theories of important western philosophers: relativism, egoism, happiness, obligation, justice, freedom, conscience, love, religious precepts, moral rules, moral attitudes and moral language.
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It may seem obvious that we have a right to privacy, and we often act as if such a right extends to our personal data online. Upon further examination, though, important and difficult questions about privacy and online data collection arise–do we have a moral right to privacy online, and if so, who should protect it? Is meaningful regulation of the Internet even possible? In this class, we’ll explore these and other issues surrounding big data, privacy, and online data collection. Through formal and informal writing as well as class discussion, we will approach these questions through a multidisciplinary lens, engaging with philosophers, data scientists, social media executives like Mark Zuckerberg, recent Internet privacy legislation (including the EU’s GDPR) and public discourse on privacy. As part of the course, students will write several argumentative essays, engage in peer feedback, reflection, and revision, and write an 8-10 page argumentative research paper on a privacy-related topic of their choice.
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In our current climate, discussions about controversial moral issues are often either shouted or typed in a comment section, neither of which seems particularly productive. Can these discussions be useful, or should we engage differently? Is it possible to rationally disagree? How can we change each other’s minds on morally charged topics such as voluntary euthanasia or immigration? In this course, we’ll construct and participate in arguments about moral issues through formal and informal writing as well as class discussion. We’ll also discuss connections between relevant literature in philosophy (including from U of R’s own Richard Feldman), political science, and psychology (including work on cognitive biases) in order to write and think about disagreement, how disagreement should inform our opinions, and what good moral discourse might look like. Students will write several argumentative essays, engage in peer feedback, reflection, and revision, and finally write an 8-10 page argumentative research paper.
In this course, we will explore moral controversies. Is abortion morally permissible? Is eating meat ethical? What duties do we have to act in the face of climate change? Together, we will examine and discuss what philosophers have to say about these and other contemporary moral issues and some more general problems in ethics, as well as touching on some more abstract questions about morality. As part of the course, students will also develop their abilities to think, read, and write argumentatively about philosophical issues.
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