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

My research takes an interdisciplinary, critical, and psychoanalytically-informed approach to the relationship between the human body and conceptions of the ‘self.’ Seeking to understand how leaders can (or should) navigate the psychological consequences of bodily vulnerability and mortality, I found that a majority of Western political thinkers sought ways to separate the ‘self’ or what is most truly human from the body, rather than confronting the body and its inevitable loss directly. Fascinated by what this separation means for the ‘self’-interest and ‘self’-preservation underpinning liberalism, I explore how assumptions about the self and its location are constructed and reinforced through interactions between leaders and followers, and what is at stake when the body is cast from view. 

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 and first book project, A Good Grief: Body and Self 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. 

I focus on Freud, Hobbes and Thucydides because they each foreground bodily vulnerability and mortality in their accounts of subjectivity and the challenges facing political societies, and because their approaches emerged amid crises that echo our own. Writing in the aftermath of plague or pandemic and warfare, they witnessed their contemporaries upholding visions of the self freed from the body and its limitations. While acknowledging that such visions can promote hope and courage in the face of loss, they ultimately find that separating self from body risks fomenting madness and a devaluation of physical security incompatible with social and political stability. 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.