Welcome! I am a Ph.D. Candidate in political theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. 

My research focuses on how the universal limits of the human body shape political subjectivity and the assumed location of the self. The body's privacy, vulnerability and mortality mean that human life is always marked by lack and loss. The history of political thought offers a number of potential responses to facing our bodies - but it also reveals that the relationship between the body and the self is far more malleable than we might expect. Depending on the location of the self or what is most truly one's own, the same action could be considered both self-sacrifice and self-preservation. 

In my dissertation, "A Good Grief: Body and Self in the Thought of Freud, Hobbes, and Thucydides," I turn to three different figures who each confront the body's privacy, vulnerability, and mortality as enduring challenges to political society. The differences between their approaches to the body reveal that ideas about the location of the self greatly influence our sense of reality, risk, and the good life. Thucydides, Hobbes and Freud may seem foreign or ancient to us - but in examining their teaching on the body and its psychological consequences, we may uncover hidden debts to them as well as assumptions about the body we risk taking for granted today.