Teaching and Advising

If you are a student looking to reserve a slot during student hours, you can find my Setmore link here. Your best bet at finding class resources is to check out our class Canvas page. For any other teaching and advising questions, please email me. 

I aim to be an advocate for my students. Universities can be mazes of bureaucracy where one can find oneself without adequate academic or social support. For this reason, I see caring for the well-being of my students in and outside of the classroom as one of my primary responsibilities. (Here, I take inspiration from Harry Brighouse's work on the the aims of education. ) Please don't hesitate to reach out if you're struggling, even if you're not sure what kind of support you need. 

 My instruction itself is guided by two primary objectives. First,  I design my courses to facilitate the development of skills necessary for critically engaging with ideas and presenting one's own. Sometimes this means developing the skills necessary for breaking arguments down into premises and conclusions, evaluating those arguments for validity and soundness,  and delivering one's own arguments in a clear and concise fashion. Sometimes this means developing the skills necessary for communicating ideas and experiences that have yet to be articulated through metaphor and illustrative examples. Sometimes this means developing the skills necessary for riffing on or translating the ideas of someone else as reinforcement or to make their ideas more accessible. There are many different ways to do good philosophy, which means that I aim to introduce students to many different exemplars of philosophy and to facilitate the development of a wide-ranging variety of skills. 

Second, I aim to facilitate the development of skills necessary for not only critically engaging with ideas in the abstract, but also engaging with ideas as they are presented by  real people. My hope, then, is for students to develop the epistemic humility, charity, and willingness to engage in reasoning with others necessary for reasoning as a social practice and not just reasoning in isolation. I also aim to facilitate the cultivation of the tenacity necessary to resist hopelessness in the face of inevitable fallibility, and to resist hopelessness in the face of oppressive epistemic contexts. (Here, I take inspiration from Kyla Ebels-Duggan's work on intellectual virtue and Kristie Dotson's work on concrete flowers and the profession of philosophy.)

I currently serve as the Graduate Teaching Associate coordinator at San Francisco State. In this role, I serve as a support and supervisor for GTAs in the Department of Philosophy and supervise the course PHIL 718: Teaching Philosophy. I also work with the wonderful Kimbrough Moore to host weekly pedagogy workshops for the Department of Philosophy (if you're interested in philosophy and rock climbing, I highly recommend following kimbroughclimbs on Instagram). 

While at UNC, I received the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. You can see some of my reflections on pedagogy here. Some (and only some!!) of my favorite scholars of education with far more meaningful reflections include Jennifer Morton, Anthony Jack, Gina Schouten, Paula McAvoy, and Winston Thompson. 

At SFSU, I have advised 10+ MA theses and have served on many more MA committees. If you are interested in working with me, please email to set up an appointment so that we can chat about your project and the advising relationship. 

Current courses (at SFSU): 

Seminar in Philosophical Writing (graduate)

Philosophy of Love (graduate)

Courses Taught:

at SFSU

The Moral Psychology of Agency and Responsibility (graduate)

The Moral Psychology of Love, Dependency, and Vulnerability (graduate)

Philosophy of Education (graduate)

Directed Readings (senior capstone)

Moral Attitudes (graduate)

Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (x3)

Seminar in Philosophical Writing (graduate)

Ethics in Medicine (x3)

Feminist Moral Psychology (graduate)

Philosophical Issues in Artificial Intelligence (graduate)

at UNC- Chapel Hill

Introduction to Ethics 

Research Ethics (university-wide graduate seminar) 

Social Ethics and Political Thought

African American Political Philosophy 

Moral and Philosophical Issues in Education 

Moral and Philosophical Issues of Gender in Society

Bioethics

Syllabi available upon request.