Graduate Students
The Theory Centre is currently home to over 60 full-time
Students can view a copy of the Student Assembly Constitution here.
Kamran Ahmed
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My doctoral work explores the relationship between Ancient Philosophical Skepticism and its role in Quranic Philosophy. My Master's thesis engaged with the philosophy of Rene Descartes and the pedagogical use of doubt in the "Meditations on First Philosophy".
M. Curtis Allen
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: M. Curtis Allen is currently pursuing doctoral research focused on the concept of 'sense' in Wittgenstein and Deleuze as it comes into contact with problems in the philosophy of language and logic, semiotics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. He is also interested in contemporary forms of rationalism and their relation to art and politics. His most recent publication is 'The Metaphysical Subject and Logical Space: Solipsism and Singularity in the Tractatus'.
Jeremy Arnott
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Jeremy Arnott is a PhD. Candidate at the Centre for Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His research examines the “Frankfurt School” as both an intellectual category and as a constellation of thinkers (with specific focus on Benjamin and Adorno). More broadly, he is interested in the various “post-histories” of German Idealism in the 20th century (Canadian Idealism, The Frankfurt School).
Deanna Aubert
Master's candidate
Jake Bellone
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Interested in Badiou, communist theory, Marxist Humanism and Raya Dunayevskaya, the anti-underconsumptionist argument, and how the formal matrix of Christianity provides an insight into the formation of a contemporary communist discipline
Michael Bodkin
Doctoral candidate
Kathryn Carney
Masters candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Interests include theory-based iconology (critical, psychoanalytic, semiotic); early twentieth-century art history and its visual rhetorics; representations of physical violence; „other“ bodies (e.g. queer, disfigured, disabled) in avant-gardist art, notably Weimar
Shubhayan Chakrabarti
Doctoral candidateAustin Chisholm
Master's candidateChristina Burke
Doctoral candidate
Grant Dempsey
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Deleuze's concept of fabulation; theories of myth, storytelling and worldbuilding; intersections of art, aesthetics, and anthropology; ontological pluralism and cosmopolitics; ancient Indian literature and philosophy, and the Sanskrit language; contemporary speculative fiction; game studies.
Thomas Doerksen
Doctoral candidateAndrew Evans
Doctoral candidate
Julian Evans
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: I am interested in how the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty can be brought into productive conversation with the decolonial philosophies of land articulated by Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. My work attempts to further this dialogue by rethinking the philosophies of nature which shape our everyday relationships to the non-human world, particularly in the lived experience of our encounters with animals, plants and natural objects.
David Goldman
Doctoral candidate
Katie Grant
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: For my doctoral research I am thinking about the weather as a conduit between bodies and language, particularly as one compatible with both the everyday and the extraordinary. My masters thesis, “Bodies: Punk, Love and Marxism,” further demonstrates my reliance on trios, but other interests are always on the periphery—including music; literature; feminist, queer, and Marxist theory; fashion; and spitting on Hegel. An omnivorous reader, but partial to Roland Barthes and Agnes Heller.
Can Guven
Doctoral candidateRobert Halperin
Master's candidateMatthew Harker
Doctoral candidate
Camilo Andrés Hoyos
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Critical Psychology, mysticism, subjectivization, subjectivity and its dissolution. My actual research focuses on the notion of the non-self and critiques psychology’s ideology and ontological supposition of the self as an absolute reality.
Ema Hu
Master's candidateAlexandra Hudecki
Master's candidate
Maxwell Hyett
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Cyclopes. Why is it that the majority of art history is meant for one eye? Why are Cyclopes beastly to Homer and godly to Hesiod? What does it mean to have Cyclopean masonry? Does theory have any depth perception? Or is its perspective illusionistic like Parrhasius' curtain painting? And, why are they called 'orb-eyed'?
Won Jeon
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Gregory Bateson’s research in mental process, communication and epistemology, particularly in theories of perception that account for matters previously excluded from Newtonian and Darwinist sciences (i.e. dreams, myth, religion, love, art); Ancient Greek myth, poetry, and philosophy as systemic models for discerning modern/contemporary aesthetic and ethical experience; aesthetics of the ineffable/unsayable; metaphor as ecological logic; relationship between contexts of learning and content of thought; ‘experimental’ music and film.
Jennifer Komorowski
Doctoral candidate
Alexandra Lepine
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Marxism, Maoism, Cultural production of revolutionary movements, Indigenous resurgence, theories of ideology and subjectivity, and Canadian literature. My doctoral project examines proletarian culture as a means of contextualising the cultural mass work of the Canadian communists, starting with the CPC up to the Anti-Revisionist parties of the 1980’s.
Monika Mandoki
Doctoral candidateBenjamin Maynard
Doctoral candidate
Taylor McGoey
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My research interests include spectorial pleasure and shock, Hollywood films, cinematic images, Deleuze, masochism, Benjamin, feminist film theory, psychoanalytic film theory, Mulvey, movement and time images.
Alexander Mcintosh
Master's candidate
Anna Mirzayan
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: I am interested in the intersection of post-human aesthetics and semiocapital through the lens of feminist phenomenology/psychoanalysis, literature and new media. I study the cyborg, the alien and the monstrous feminine.
Emily Monaghan
Master's candidateLiam Morantz
Master's candidateAlexander Morgan
Master's candidateJudith Muster
Doctoral candidate
Tyler Nash
Doctoral candidateDouglas Ord
Doctoral candidateVikram Panchmatia
Doctoral candidateJustas Patkauskas
Doctoral candidateScott Pawluik
Master's candidateAnda Pleniceanu
Doctoral candidateAnnaliese Pope
Doctoral candidateMatthew Prokopiw
Doctoral candidateMina Rosefield
Doctoral candidateMegan Sherritt
Doctoral candidateKayleigh Shield
Masters candidateRyan Shuvera
Doctoral candidate
Jeremy Smith
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: I study the theoretical in(ter)vention, scholarly reception, and practical application of François Laruelle’s enigmatic concept of non-philosophy. In particular, I investigate the ‘serpentine’ trajectory of his oeuvre from the 1970s up to now, of what is to be said and what is to be done, tracing the political and antagonistic qualities of Laruelle’s work that are whitewashed and defanged in Anglo-American academic literature. Through this investigation, my work seeks the means to tear non-philosophy from its academic enclosure and to lay the groundwork for a human politics or non-politics of invention.
Kyle Stewart
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: i am interested in queer theory’s dealings with questions pertaining to futurity, particularly in contemporary times (i.e. as a response to problems raised by the anthropocene, climate change, and the corresponding rise of nationalistic political ideologies). i am engrossed in the works of Lacan, Derrida, Mbembe, Jasbir Puar, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, José Esteban Muñoz, Eve Tuck, and Ian Baucom. i am implicated in my examinations of the (queer) body, (good/bad) citizenship, ideology, power, and the nation-state.
Natalie Trevino
Doctoral candidate
Jacob Vangeest
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Working broadly at the intersection of political theory and continental philosophy, my research investigates the possibility of socio-political change at the axis of positivity and negativity by drawing upon the lineages of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and (to a lesser degree) Schmitt in the disciplines of political theology, Deleuze studies, and non-philosophy.
Dylan Vaughan
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My doctoral research attempts a re-reading of Jean-François Lyotard, a neglected figure within 20th century French philosophy. In particular, I am interested in emphasizing the speculative strands of Lyotard’s thinking, which have withered due to an over-emphasis on his critical and political texts by secondary literature.
Nick Wees
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My research focusses on urban space, sense experience, and the improvisational nature of everyday life. Specifically, I am interested in conflicting understandings of, and claims to, public space, and how street performance and street arts (in a very general sense) can be understood as forms of counter-hegemonic spatial practices. More generally, I am interested in creativity and the creative act; subjectivity, sense perception, and embodiment; marginality and marginal spaces; urban ethnography; bricolage and DIY (sub)cultures; and theories of space, everyday life, and the ‘politics of the sensible.’ I also have enduring interests in music, sound art and sound studies, and small-scale food practices.
Al Whitney
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My research interests include Heidegger, phenomenology, radical phenomenology, post-Heideggerian philosophy, and death and dying.
Andrew Woods
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Intellectual history, conspiracy theories, fascism and the radical right, the Frankfurt School, critical pedagogy, Raymond Williams, American studies, Marxist historiography, Pierre Bourdieu, and post-autonomist theory.
Thomas Wormald
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My primary focus is on the thought of Catherine Malabou, with my doctoral project being a historical and philosophical exploration of antecedents to Malabou’s articulation of plasticity, tracking how it peregrinates from British seventeenth-century philosophy, specifically the marginalized current of Cambridge Platonism, through Shaftesbury to Herder and German Romanticism, to, finally, German Idealism. I explore how this genealogy complements and deepens Malabou’s ongoing thinking of plasticity, as well as yields potential imaginative and philosophical resources that offer different ways of conceptualizing our being-with and relating to the world than those provided by the dominant onto-epistemic and socio-politic logics (such as those emerging from the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Kant) that largely structure the modern Western imaginary. My research interests include plasticity, continental philosophy, German Romanticism and Idealism, and contemporary theory (decolonial studies, black studies and critical race theory, feminist and gender studies). I am the co-editor of the collection Thinking Catherine Malabou: Passionate Detachments (Rowman and Littlefield, April 2018).
Elden Yungblut
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: I aim to deconstruct and unsettle dominant epistemological and sociocultural understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. My research centers on the various points of connection among such disparate domains as 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, queer theory, transgender studies, critical posthumanism, and new materialism.
