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

Research Interests / Specializations: My researcher's brew currently contains: memes and contemporary visual culture, memory and storytelling, death and humour, absurdism and surrealism, dreams and the sublime.

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.

Justin Campbell

Master's candidate

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

Research Interests / Specializations: Bronte (they/them) explores Hannah Arendt's use of biography and her notions of public/private as models for thinking about intellectual life. In particular, Bronte is deeply invested in the ways that queer and trans folk have built rich theories of queer life beyond academic study.

Kailey Cutillo

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I am interested in literary criticism and cultural texts focused on matriarchal principles of society and politics to analyze our current Western democratic political systems and the language of these systems to determine ways in which they can be dismantled in favour of centring an ethics of care in political and social discourse.

James Dalton

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research examines the thought of classical pragmatists and their relationship to the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri. To illustrate their contemporary relevance, I will explore the issue of social media’s ‘gamblification’ and how it affects our understanding of selfhood and learning.

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.

Hayden Debruler

Doctoral candidate

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

Research Interests / Specializations: Dickson's research investigates art historical Formalism. Formalism—at base descriptive of that methodological practice in which the form of the work of art is taken to be the starting point of further analysis—has been much maligned in art history. Frequently described as a-historical and a-political, Formalism’s discredit, a result of the early 1960s jettisoning of all methods associated with aesthetic modernism, is no longer justifiable. Dickson posits art historical Formalism as rich in possibility for and in the present day.

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

Research Interests / Specializations: My research, informed by my experience as a Registered Nurse, is at the intersection of healthcare systems, nursing practice and technology. Drawing on continental philosophy’s engagement with technology I am exploring the implications of widespread machine learning and artificial intelligence in healthcare. I am particularly interested in the incalculable, non-scalable and tinkering nature of practice in this context. I am working with Heidegger, Stiegler, Annemarie Mol, and Yuk Hui among others.

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.

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

Research Interests / Specializations: Situated at the intersection of revolutionary praxis and metaphysics. Focused on identity and ideology. Interests are Spinoza’s Ethics, Louis Althusser, Structuralist Marxism, Nietzsche, David Lynch, Lovecraft, body horror, and Soto Zen Buddhism. “Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born.”

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

Samir Khondoker

Master's candidate

Jack Krywulak

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Psychoanalysis. Kierkegaard. Marxism. Discursivity. Ritual. Korean Honorifics.

Fernando Lameda

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My areas of study revolve around Cultural and Media Studies, Philosophy, and Marxism. I am interested in how cultural production and consumption within capitalist society generates moments of tension in what Guy Debord called the “Society of Spectacle”. Therefore, how the resolution of these tensions can articulate new subjectivities that strengthen or weaken commodity fetishism

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.

Glynis MacLeod

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I work at the intersection of continental philosophy, literature, and cultural studies, specifically phenomenology, oceanic and colonial literature, and theories of reading and place. My work as an organic farmer also informs my interests in material history and practice (making stuff from scratch), critiques of capitalism, and Indigenous theory. I primarily work with Merleau-Ponty and Melville.

Myles MacPherson

Doctoral candidate

Jean McLachlin

Master's candidate

Charles Martin

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.

Douglas Ord

Doctoral candidate

Elk Paauw

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Trans studies and autobiography, comics formalism, and the subject through time. Teaching: trans studies, Film and TV Studies (mostly global animation practices, including anime). Previous work in phenomenology, Lacan, and the philosophy of time (four-dimensionalism). Side work in hyperobjects and geological timescales, evolutionary biology and existentialism.

Joseph Palmeri

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Metaphysics. Subjectivity. Cultural studies, religious and literary criticism. Nihilism and ideology. Political theory. Theology.

Sam Paskuski

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research looks at theories of metaphysical anarchy (Reiner Schurmann, Max Stirner, Gilles Deleuze). I deconstruct and destitute the history of arche through Schurmann and Stirner, respectively. I then use Deleuze to build a metaphysics capable of substantiating an anarchist politics.

Annaliese Pope

Doctoral 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.

Deepro Roy

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: As the fabled the "Asian Century" unfolds, a theoretical grasp of the nature of the Asian Modern has become both imperative and problematic. My research explores debates on aesthetics and capitalist temporality (drawing on Lukács, Jameson, Bergson, Deleuze, Rancière, and various Asian cultural theorists) to characterize "Modernism" in Asia in terms of two interacting aesthetic impulses: a Realist one (related to the "developmental" vision) and a Futurist one (associated with the aesthetic of speed celebrated in various contemporary techno-nationalisms).

Maksim Sandic

Master's candidate

Ulysse Sizov

Master's candidate

Antonia Stan

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My doctoral research delineates the nation’s economic and political function in Eastern Europe under a neoliberal governmentality. I am interested in conducting a historical and theoretical analysis of the formation and disintegration of the citizen-subject vis-à-vis the erosion of state power in peripheral economies. I am particularly interested in the works of Étienne Balibar, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Domenico Losurdo, Jacques Derrida, and Friedrich Hegel.

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.

Benjamin Stone

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I am exploring new ways to understand pure consciousness epistemologically from a first-person, subjective point of view. Key questions are whether it constitutes a non-qualia state; how 'that' could be known; or a unique, subtle form of qualia (unlike other phenomena); or whether it constitutes a ‘qualia-only’ state with something like ontological primacy.

Lynne Taylor

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I am interested in transgender perspectives in contemporary theory and philosophy. Through the lens of critical phenomenology and transfeminism, I wish to elaborate the specificity of trans experiences by exploring how gender and sex might produce (and be produced by) differences in intersubjectivity, corporeality, temporality and epistemology.

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

Research Interests / Specializations: My current research interests are focused on Human Rights in theory and practice. My focus is on Economic and Social human rights in Canada and how our current neoliberal politics and capitalist economics disproportionately effect our most vulnerable, and is the source of the current crisis of homelessness and poverty.

Gabriel WainioTheberge

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My interests pinball around the surprisingly dense intersection of climate change, eco-technical speculation, post-anthropocentric values, rationality and rationalization, historical and negative dialectics, information ontology, literal and non-literal databases, possible worlds/minds, and online political and artistic subcultures. My current research focus is the literary mediation of technical reason in serial web novel genres including “rationalfic” and “LitRPG”. I also write and publish literary science fiction and trash theory at Andata Express.

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).

Hanxiao Yue

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research interests include the Frankfurt School (Benjamin and Kracauer in particular), film theories in Weimar Republic, avant-garde in the early 20th century, Nietzsche and so forth. Currently I am thinking about a project focused on the dynamics between the isolated image and montage in Weimar cinema.

Sangie Zaitsoff

Doctoral candidate

Zhuoer Zhang

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My interests are in phenomenology (late Heidegger) and philosophy of art (especially painting). My most recent research was a phenomenological study of the construction of space in paintings from different traditions. Previously I have done research on the Daoist influences in Heidegger. I also have growing interests in Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben. Other interests: association football (soccer), music, languages, geoguessr.