Graduate Students

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".

M. Curtis Allen

Doctoral candidate

Research 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 candidate

Research 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 candidate

Research 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

Nicholas Birmingham

Master's candidate

Michael Bodkin

Doctoral candidate

Kathryn Carney

Masters candidate

Austin Chisholm

Master's candidate

Colby Chubbs

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: German Idealism (especially the shift from Kant to Hegel and its social/political consequences); Psychoanalysis; Kleist and Kafka; transmissibility, language, and Event(s)

Chris Coughlin

Doctoral candidate

Eva Cupchik

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.

Jon Doering

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research looks at rhetoric versus philosophy, and rhetoric joining philosophy, in late 20th century thought. I am also interested in the powerful rhetoric -- and near absence of philosophy -- directing modern financial markets.

Dillon Douglas

Masters candidate

Jessica Ellis

Masters candidate

Andrew Evans

Doctoral candidate

Julian Evans

Doctoral candidate

Research 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.

Dru Farro

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My primary research is on English education from the perspectives of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. My hobbies include reading novels, being an amateur naturalist (specializing in birds, edible plants, trees and now I have a growing interest in friendly bugs), playing the guitar, making jokes, cooking, and star observing/gazing.

Yuri Forbes-Petrovich

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My doctoral research is examining the role of contingency in the constitution of Christian faith and Truth. This work critiques contemporary phenomenology, deconstruction and materialism through an emphasis on the historical-hermeneutic and alethurgic elements of Kierkegaardian existentialism, Foucault's ethical discourse analysis and Badiouian mathematical ontology for Christian thought.

Maryam Golafshani

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research interests include literary theory, deconstruction, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and feminist theory—especially as they relate to the physician-patient encounter.

David Goldman

Doctoral candidate

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.

Can Guven

Doctoral candidate

James Hall

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research focuses on notions of development and delay in Romantic and idealist literature, philosophy, and the 19th century sciences. Research interests include vitalism, epigenesis, evolution, nature, and temporality.

Alexander Harasymiw

Master's candidate

Matthew Harker

Doctoral candidate

Camilo Andrés Hoyos

Master's candidate

Research 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.

Alexandra Hudecki

Master's candidate

Dylan Hughes

Master's candidate

Maxwell Hyett

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research wanders, though I orbit concerns and conflations of the virtual and the real: contemporary art, post-truth, social media, data v. knowledge, memory, aesthetics, accelerationism, play, possibility and potentiality, digitalism, and the work of Byung-Chul Han and the so-called 'Berlin School'.

Alexander Jackson

Doctoral candidate

Won Jeon

Master's candidate

Research 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 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.

Michelle Liu

Master's candidate

Shannon Lodoen

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Interests (from general to specific) include semiotics, rhetoric, discourse analysis, mythologization, how language use influences perception of the self and others, and the role of rhetoric/language in the development and maintenance of social structures.

Monika Mandoki

Doctoral candidate

Benjamin Maynard

Doctoral candidate

Taylor McGoey

Master's candidate

Ilya Merlin

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: I am interested in intellectual counter-history from medieval metaphysics to current psychoanalytic studies, hip-hop scholarship, and questions of enfleshed ontology. Sigmund Freud's Castilian Academy and Georges Bataille's College de Sociologie largely inform my guiding questions, technique, heimlich pranks, and political horizons.

Anna Mirzayan

Doctoral candidate

Research 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.

Adam Mohamed

Master's candidate

Tyler Nash

Doctoral candidate

Douglas Ord

Doctoral candidate

Vikram Panchmatia

Doctoral candidate

Justas Patkauskas

Doctoral candidate

Wil Patrick

Master's candidate

Anda Pleniceanu

Doctoral candidate

Annaliese Pope

Doctoral candidate

Matthew Prokopiw

Doctoral candidate

Mark Shelvock

Master's candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Investigating the dimensions of death, uncertainty, suffering, impermanence, life transitions, and meaning-making within human reality. By engaging with these truths of existence, it is possible to live life more authentically and with deeper awareness. Utilizing interdisciplinary approaches in thanatology, continental philosophy, humanistic psychology, phenomenology, and existentialism.

Eric Shepperd

Master's candidate

Megan Sherritt

Doctoral candidate

Kayleigh Shield

Masters candidate

Ryan Shuvera

Doctoral candidate

Jeremy Smith

Doctoral candidate

Nicholas Tostowaryk

Masters candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Spontaneity and historical materialism; Surrealism, literary and cultural theory, and twentieth century literatures; Romantic Marxism and Benjamin, Luxemburg, and Lukacs

Natalie Trevino

Doctoral candidate

Jacob Vangeest

Master's candidate

Research 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 candidate

Nick Wees

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research focusses on urban space and everyday experience—specifically: conflicting understandings of, and claims to, public and semi-public spaces, and the possibilities of street arts and ‘street culture’ as counter-hegemonic spatial practices. More generally, I am interested in creativity and the creative act; subjectivity, sense perception, and embodiment; marginality and marginal spaces; and, the city and the improvisations of daily life. I also have enduring interests in music, sound art, and food practices.

Al Whitney

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: My research interests include Heidegger, phenomenology, radical phenomenology, post-Heideggerian philosophy, and death and dying.

Andrew Woods

Doctoral candidate

Research Interests / Specializations: Simone Weil, post-autonomism (specifically, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Silvia Federici), futurability and futurology, Ivan Illich, sensibility, contemporary forms of fascism, immaterial labour and Semiocapitalism, aesthetics, conspiracy theories, Paul Virilio, accelerationism, history of ideas, and love.

Thomas 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).

Elden Yungblut

Master's candidate

Research 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.

Sangie Zaitsoff

Doctoral candidate