Research profile and interests
My academic work develops expansively from an interest in post-Kantian aesthetics into fields such as political theory, art and literary history and theory, ethics, and the philosophy of experience.
My methods are grounded in the field of philosophy, broadly conceived. I work with critical theory, genealogical approaches, historical and materialist analyses. In my non-academic work, I apply these methods and approaches to an almost unlimited range of topics and fields.
Current research
a) In draft
‘The Prisoners’ Laughter: Experience, Suffering and Representation in Sullivan’s Travels’
‘Disinterest and Equality in Aesthetic Experience: Rancière’s Reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment’
‘The Aesthetic Regime, Fragmentation and the Life of Art: Jacques Rancière’s Kantian Reading of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’
‘Allegory and Commodity in the Space of Aesthetics’
‘The Art of Laziness and the Politics of Work’
b) Future projects
The practice of turn-taking
Aesthetic judgment: various topics including equality and communicability
‘The reality TV show in the age of asset inflation’
Neoliberal epistemology of the market, or the sublime after Hayek
Degrowth and ecological economics, as well as the intersection of nature and art
Between two deaths: voluntary assisted dying and psychoanalysis
Critique of Therapeutic Reason: on care, politics, ethics, aesthetics
Australian literature (Kylie Tennant, Ernestine Hill, M. Barnard Eldershaw), politics, labour and nature
I maintain many research interests. Please contact me for more information.
PhD Thesis, Awarded 2022
Supervisors: Professor Alison Ross (Monash), Professor Catherine Mills (Monash)
This thesis analyses the work of three philosophers who are rarely connected but, when considered in the context of the tradition of post-Kantian aesthetics, illuminate the connection between individual and shared experience. The thesis presents the challenges posed to experience in modernity, outlining an historically specific conception of experience in the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière and Stanley Cavell respectively. The thesis explores the ways that subjective experience makes claims on others. The starting point of this thesis is the dramatic changes to the concept and feeling of experience in modernity, characterised by the loss of traditional authority and the possibility of new forms of freedom. By locating the three philosophers in the Kantian tradition of aesthetics, their views on the possibility of shared experience can be compared and evaluated. Developing and engaging with recent scholarship on each, the thesis establishes new connections between these thinkers. The thesis defends a conception of shared, common experience from within the aesthetic framework. Each philosopher identifies possibilities within ordinary experience through which such experience can be transformed and fulfilled in shared experiences with others. These possibilities are examined in cultural, educational and political contexts where shared encounters with common objects enables the meaning of experience to be both contested and shared. The thesis provides a counterargument to hypertrophic and literalist conceptions of experience that renounce or diminish the significance of shared, communicable and enduring experience as a site of both freedom and orientation in the world. It argues that ordinary experience is in principle sharable and communicable even when it is fully subjective. The framework of Kantian aesthetic experience guides the evaluation of each philosopher’s approach, and provides an account of how heightened meaning can emerge in experience that is both historically specific as well as open and imaginative in its engagement with ordinary, material objects.
My honours thesis, undertaken with Ass. Professor Dalia Nassar at Sydney University, examined the aesthetics of the Early German Romantics.
