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

My work brings a critical, psychoanalytically informed approach to the relationship between the body, the self, and political life, with a particular focus on how the body’s vulnerability and mortality shape dynamics between leaders and followers. My dissertation, A Good Grief: The Psychological Consequences of the Human Body in the Thought of Freud, Hobbes, and Thucydides, shows how conceptions of the body and the presumed location of the self are historically malleable, require interpretation, and play a central role in informing citizens’ expectations of leaders. I turn to three figures who all warn that when political actors and communities conceptually separate the “self” from the body - whether by elevating immaterial souls, disembodied reason, or fantasies of transcendence -  personal and political turmoil results, from self-destructive behaviour to tolerance of oppression and an increased readiness for violence. Ultimately, I argue that in challenging us to confront the body as the location of the self, Thucydides, Hobbes and Freud reveal grief or mourning as a civic virtue, while illustrating how texts that focus on (rather than flee from) the body may be an essential part of civic education. 

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.