Graduate Students

Helen Abbot

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Abbot’s research interests include: music studies; sound studies; kinship; gender and sexuality; love studies; modernism/s; tourism/travel studies. Broadly, she explores the nature of intimacies across multiple forms of kinship and lifeways in a variety of contexts, and how these intimacies are mediated by sonic phenomena. Her thesis investigates the role of sound and music in Anaïs Nin’s fictional works. More specifically, her project is an exploration of the ways in which Nin mobilized her own style of musical writing to explore the complexities of womanhood in relation to love, desire and self-knowing.

Evan Adamou

Master's candidate

Kamran Ahmed

Doctoral candidate

Research 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".

Kashfia Arif

Doctoral candidate

Christopher Austin

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I am interested in positive psychology, affect theory, and pragmatism. My research identifies interesting and important intersections between these schools of thought and mobilizes them towards understanding how social media shapes us. There is a famous Culkin quote to this effect about how "we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us".

Seoyeon Bae

Master's candidate

Suhyang Baek

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My general interests range from the limitations, contradictions, inabilities, and absurdities (and a sort of possibility that nonetheless exists) of human beings to death, violence, tragedy, history, and otherness. So far, my theoretical background has been focused on aesthetics, art theory (esp. drama and performance), and critical theory (esp. the Frankfurt School). And recently, I am willingly and slowly expanding my research area into post-modernism, post-colonialism, and social science while contemplating how to interweave my interests and theories more productively.

Nicholas Birmingham

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: The aim of my research is to develop the notion of diagrammatic thinking. Following Gilles Châtelet, I examine particular moments in the history of science where conceptual revolutions are directly informed by notational experiments (symbols, diagrams, etc.). I bring Châtelet into dialogue with the semiotic of C. S. Peirce and the transcendental philosophy of Salomon Maimon to better illustrate the rigorous kind of creativity inherent to both philosophy and science.

Brendan Brown

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I am interested in a new phase of deconstruction. I find such a possibility in two locations, as of yet: one, in the anarchical writings of Reiner Schürmann and Giorgio Agamben with their insistence on praxis before being, and two, in the writings of Sylvia Wynter and the autopoietic possibility of a New Science of the Word and the human being as praxis. My work investigates alternative approaches, strategies, and conceptions to deconstruction which would think the closure of Western metaphysics as a possibility for the birth of a new stage of deconstruction.

Shubhayan Chakrabarti

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My immediate research interests comprise Post-Work Criticism with a focus on Autonomism, Geomateriality and Luddism. I am particularly concerned with work as a rhetoric in post-industrial society designed by immaterial motivations including religion and myth. In this respect, I explore questions like the relationship between work and guilt as well as environmental decline as an extension of the denigration of the self. Outside my dissertation interests, areas I pursue involve Film Studies, Film Music, theoretical interventions of nationhood in the works of Salman Rushdie, Benedict Anderson and Vijay Mishra, Modernist Literature, and the relationship between Postmodernism and Memory.

Shane Cooney

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research develops a psychoanalytic conception of addiction, specifically through Lacan’s re-theorization of anxiety and its last defenses. Coupling this with a Marxian analysis, I argue that the historically specific forms of addiction we see today are anxiety responses to the alienation emerging contemporaneously with the globalization of capitalism—beginning with the colonial and imperialist projects of the 15th century—and its imperative to jouir.

Brian Cordero

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I’m interested in overcoming the distinctions between individual experiences of temporality, political/social theories of temporality, and (meta)physical views of temporality. Some thinkers of particular interest to me are José Esteban Muñoz, Walter Mignolo, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Rahul Rao, Jacques Ellul, Jasbir K. Puar, Henri Bergson, Jacques Camatte, Subcomandante Marcos, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Rethinking temporality is just one aspect of the end goal: to think of ways to challenge the global domination of capital through a schizoanalytic theory-praxis.

Bronte Cronsberry

Doctoral candidate

Avery Dawson

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I am currently interested in problematization and critique within the history of philosophy and its political determination as “events” through technologies of power. Using Foucaultian genealogy, I investigate what causes concepts to break down in their respective conceptual systems and how these breakdowns become problems that transform our everyday life.

Mitch De Lange

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My interests are Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray and Cixous. My research attempts to understand the ways institutions appropriate the unique resistance in abuse survivor testimony and rewrite it into acceptable modes of public discourse.

Grant Dempsey

Doctoral candidate

Research 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.

Emily Dickson

Doctoral candidate

Thomas Doerksen

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My work focuses on critiques of modern scientific practice and alternatives to the reigning episteme and its attitudes. The dissertation I'm writing is a Foucauldian and Bachelardian archaeology of various alchemists and chemists at key moments in the formation of modern science.

Julian Evans

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research considers how perception and imagination are involved in ecosystems and the more-than-human dimensions of land and place. I am interested in how the traditions of existentialism and phenomenology, in particular the work of Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty, can be opened up through dialogue and encounter with non-Western philosophy, especially the Indigenous teachings of Turtle Island. In addition to my research, I am an avid birder, a DJ and I create sound compositions of audio field recordings. I am currently a visiting graduate fellow with the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, the territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking peoples.

Ali Ghasemibarghi

Doctoral candidate

Mara Gonzalez

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My current research interests are in aesthetics and politics, and the relationship between these two. In the past, I have done research in Latin American film and literature, as well as hermeneutic and ethical analysis of literary texts. Other of my interests include the concepts of ideology, discourse, domination, propaganda, and visual culture.

Katie Grant

Doctoral candidate

Research 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.

Hilary Hall

Doctoral candidate

Matthew Harker

Doctoral candidate

Todd Hartley

Doctoral candidate

Peter Heft

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research primarily revolves around questions of energeticism and materialism, the crux between the two being most fully explicated by Freud, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, and Land. My current course of study is a genealogical account of so-called ‘libidinal materialism’ and impersonal desire as ontology undergirding both speculative realism and capitalism as process.

Yiling Hu

Master's candidate

Maxwell Hyett

Doctoral candidate

Research 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'?

Skylar Izzard

Master's candidate

Junyu Ke

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Current project: how body movement could raise ecological consciousness. Research interests: Daoist body cultivation, phenomenology, embodied cognition, environmental philosophy

Spencer Kett

Master's candidate

Samir Khondoker

Master's candidate

Fernando Lameda Garcia

Doctoral candidate

Tanner Layton

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Especially in the context of the pervasive feelings of loss that reverberate in our pandemic present, my research is concerned with emerging forms of neoliberal-colonial subjectivity and ideology. While it has been theorized that pursuits of happiness and enjoyment conform to a cultural imperative (“a normative pressure”), I’m interested in unpacking the—simultaneously new and ancient—imperative to ‘live a life of meaning.’ What does it mean to live a life of meaning today? What discourses and values inform us? What ways of life are conducive to it? In his book Death, Todd May argues that “A worthy life, after all, cannot be lived by one who is in the grip of an illusion.” I beg to differ: we need an illusion. The question is, which illusion(s) we are gripped by. For me, it’s psychoanalytic theory, affect theory, queer theory; it’s existentialism, it’s Marxism, it’s post-structuralism; it’s Sara Ahmed, Stuart Hall, Leanne Simpson; it’s Mark Fisher, it’s Byung-Chul Han, it’s Todd McGowan.

Alexandra Lepine

Doctoral candidate

Research 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.

Aidan MacKay

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research interests surround German idealist aesthetics. I aim to look at the relationship between art and philosophy and how art can be used to explicate what philosophy can’t empirically by bringing the aesthetic theories of Schopenhauer, Hegel and Schelling into dialogue.

Myles MacPherson

Master's candidate

Shakil Malik

Master's candidate

Jean McLachlin

Master's candidate

Bianca Merucci

Master's candidate

Liam Morantz

Doctoral candidate

Judith Muster

Doctoral candidate

Lennon Needham

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Technology's relationship to nature and its role in structuring both the external environment and subjectivity. The role of technè in the history of western thought. Marxist conceptions of production, the subject & nature. Digital media’s place within the philosophy of technology. Relationships between ecology, technology & ideas of self.

Elk Paauw

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I'm Elk, an autotheoretical comics artist and queer transdude (he/him pronouns, please!), excited to be here! My master's research was a webcomic on the philosophy of time called 4dtime.space, on four-dimensionalism and time-slice ontology in comics and film formalism. I'm continuing my studies here building a trans metaphysics where I'm looking at the mind/body problem through a trans lens via the subject through time, dissociation, and dysphoria/dysmorphia. Otherwise, I am interested in animation studies, TV Studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Nietzschean existentialism, postmodern surrealism, and the philosophy of death.

Joseph Palmeri

Doctoral candidate

Vikram Panchmatia

Doctoral candidate

Sam Paskuski

Master's candidate

Annaliese Pope

Doctoral candidate

Suarjan Prasai

Master's candidate

Paria Rahimi

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I am an eclectic researcher interested in resistance studies, inverse theology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and synthetic readings between these fields. The general contour of my academic project is the feminist re-articulation of critical theories. In my dissertation, I study the digital activism of Iranian counter-power and digital repressive apparatuses of the state through the lens of autonomist Marxism. I comradely spotlight the blind spots of my theatrical framework in a close and thorough analysis of contemporary Iranian society and its sociopolitical problematics. I further my application of Marxist theory by adding nuanced local and feminist façades to it.

Kit Roffey

Master's candidate

Mina Rosefield

Doctoral candidate

Deepro Roy

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My critique of Futurism (its vision of modernity) detects impasses that went on to inform our global doxa of "alternative modernities" (emboldening many techno-nationalisms). I juxtapose the Futurist paradigm with modernists in colonial India, who, far from negotiating "cultural difference" in zones of contact, exemplified modernist temporality and aesthetics.

Vinay Sharma

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Originally born and raised in Winnipeg, MB - I am a second-year student at the Centre for Theory and Criticism. My interests lie in tracing out a purely materialist, vulgar and cosmic understanding of production starting from Marx to Gilles Deleuze and Nick Land. In doing so, I hope to explore the relationship between thought and production. Outside of school, I enjoy - watching sports, hanging out with friends, and listening to music.

Ryan Shea

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: environmentalism, aesthetics, anxiety, Kierkegaard, American literature, Boccaccio & Dante (particularly their relation to notions of purgatory and the black plague), spectatorship/reception studies. My research focuses on how conceptions of death changed once we began to understand the earth, and necessarily humanity, as fated to die through the lens of art.

Sean Sokolov

Master's candidate

Antonia Stan

Doctoral candidate

Jason Stocker

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research examines ways in which philosophies of nature yield normative orientations, and vice versa. My current focus is on the relationship between rivers, capitalism, and colonialism.

Wesley Strassburger

Master's candidate

Heather Twele

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research interests include visible/hidden disability, ableism, medical discourse and imaging, transparency/opaqueness, bodily fantasies, visual art, literature, critical phenomenology, and hermeneutics. I am currently fascinated with theorists Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, and Henri Bergson. I’m also enthralled with nineteenth-century British and Russian literature, in particular Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Jacob Vangeest

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I’m invested in a nebulous constellation of plant epistemology, the later Platonic dialogues, considerations of the ‘non,’ technics, and the lineage of theories and philosophies of becoming.

James Van Schaik

Master's candidate

Gabriel WainioTheberge

Doctoral candidate

Andrew Walker

Master's candidate

Tom Wormald

Doctoral candidate

Research 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).

Sangie Zaitsoff

Doctoral candidate