Graduate Students
The Theory Centre is currently home to over 60 full-time
Students can view a copy of the Student Assembly Constitution here.
Francis Alakija
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Black Studies, Afropessimism, International Relations Theory, Development Studies, Anti-Blackness
Biography: My research explores the libidinal economy of anti-Blackness and how it structures the theory and practice of International Relations within the global community of state and non-state actors.
Kashfia Arif
Doctoral candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Social Media, Pragmatism, Affect Theory, Happiness, Mental Health.
Biography: I am an all-but-dissertation PhD Candidate at the Theory Centre writing about mental health and happiness in the social media era. As somebody who lost a close friend to suicide at the end of my undergraduate studies, and seeing how social media and cyberbullying played a big part in this tragedy, it is a very personal project for me. My field study received high praise from my committee and I volunteered with my friend Jevi to co-coordinate the department's Theory Sessions tradition for a few years: I am passionate about Western's campus communities. Recently, I was selected for and completed the Graduate Student Innovation Scholar's program at Ivey Business School (as the only Arts & Humanities student in my cohort). I am proud to have won second place in the program's Commercialization Pitch competition and to have built meaningful relationships along the way.
Suhyang Baek
Doctoral candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch 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.
Zac Boros
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My research interests sit at the intersection of Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and informed from my experience as a social worker in mental health, palliative and hospice care, HIV/AIDS, and homelessness.
Brendan Brown
Doctoral candidateResearch 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.
Shane Cooney
Doctoral candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch 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.
Mara Gonzalez Gonzalez
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Memory Studies; Trauma Studies; Visual Culture
Biography: My doctoral research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of family memory and how hegemonic discourses become part of the family's collective imaginary.
Hilary Hall
Doctoral candidateResearch 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.
Aydan Hasanova
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Hasanova’s research explores visual indifference in contemporary art practices, specifically as a tension between interest and disinterest in the relationship among the artist, readymade object and viewer. Drawing from Duchamp’s description of “indifference” to be interpreted as complete apathy – a form of emptiness towards the object – Hasanova explores this “reaction of indifference” as “nothingness” developed by Karen Barad. Their dissertation will argue for visual indifference as a key element in the viewer’s relationship between readymade objects and readymade cultural meanings.
Maxwell Hyett
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Art theory, habit, historiography, Marcel Duchamp, Erwin Panofsky, and modern and contemporary art
Biography: Maxwell Hyett is an artist and researcher. His current work explores cyclopes, iconology, finitude, and modern and contemporary issues of the creative act.
Skylar Izzard
Master's candidateResearch 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.”
Jackson Krywulak
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: German Idealism and Romanticism. Psychoanalysis. History of 19th- and 20th-Century Thought. The (de)construction of Theory and Criticism.
Biography: My MA thesis focused on Tilottama Rajan’s readings of Hegel and Nietzsche, showing how her criticism works between speculative disciplines in order to reveal latent possibilities within encyclopedic systems of knowledge. My PhD work examines the history and criticism of 'proto-psychoanalysis' (psychoanalysis avant la lettre) as it emerged in German Idealist philosophy and British Romantic poetry of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Fernando Lameda Garcia
Doctoral candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: I study the normative pressure to live 'meaningfully' and 'authentically.' My research, therefore, traverses existentialism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and thought indebted to Plato. I focus primarily on theories of authenticity, alienation, otherness, and subjectivation by exploring how experiential encounters provide the conditions for lasting existential, ethical, and everyday fidelities. Recently, I've been moved by the work of Leanne Simpson, Charles Taylor, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Byung-Chul Han, Todd McGowan, Sara Ahmed, Mari Ruti, Soren Kierkegaard, and Alain Badiou.
Aidan MacKay
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Schopenhauer, Pessimism, Extinction Theory, and German Idealism
Biography: My project investigates the philosophical problem of human extinction through the broad lens of the German pessimist tradition. Drawing on the thought of Ulrich Horstmann, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Eduard von Hartmann, I aim to situate their work within the broader tradition of philosophical pessimism and to bring it into conversation with contemporary global uncertainties.
Glynis MacLeod
Doctoral candidateResearch 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.
Chufeng (Garry) Meng
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My interests lie at the intersections of critical & cultural theory, affect studies, phenomenology, and Chinese thought & culture. Alongside my background in continental theory and literary criticism (esp. science fiction), my attention has lately drifted toward diverse cultural forms such as film, animation, video games, and ethnography. Bringing these threads together, I explore questions of “sensibility”—how tastes and orientations take shape, loosen, and resettle, as our everyday itineraries continually remake us into something pleasantly strange…
Julian Munds
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Performance theory, Theatre (musical and non), Embodiment, Gadamer, myth and esotericism
Biography: Before becoming a scholar Julian made a large body of work writing plays, composing opera and staged music, and working as a professional actor. Since becoming a scholar he has published on everything from religious history to the philosophy of science. His current work is interested in the application of performance training to hermeneutical engagement with texts.
Elk Paauw
Doctoral candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Metaphysics. Subjectivity. Cultural studies, religious and literary criticism. Nihilism and ideology. Political theory. Theology.
Paria Rahimi
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Political Theology
Biography: My doctoral research develops a Marxist critique of the relationship between theology and political economy, tracing the emergence of a capitalist mode of transcendence. My broader project explores Shi’a political theology and the political economy of modern Iran.
Deepro Roy
Doctoral candidateResearch 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).
Colin Spencer
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Animal Studies; Artificial Life (Science & Technology Studies); hermeneutics
Teaching: Supervisor:
Biography: Colin’s research interests focus on human(centric) hermeneutics of the world, particularly regarding alterity—precisely, at the sites of animal studies and cybernetics/ science and technology studies (i.e. natural life and artificial life). Engaging at the intersecting registers of optics—hermeneutics—ontology, Colin’s work aims towards a synthesizing or folding of said natural and artificial life, along with non-human actants, via an alternative conception of narcissism—and is extensively interested in the possibilities for new ways of seeing—understanding—being seeing that are afforded from considering such connections. Theorists include Akira Lippit, Jakob von Uexküll, Hannah Arendt, N. Katherine Hayles; additionally interested in sites that branch from these core interests and paradigms, such as monster theory and existentialism.
Antonia Stan
Doctoral candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch 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
Doctoral candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch 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.
Riva Thakur
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Study the role of education within oppressive systems and the power dynamics shaping educational spaces. My work explores possibilities for dismantling and reconstituting these structures through Gayatri Spivak’s (and others’) theories of globalization, aesthetic education, and subalternity, emphasizing transformative pedagogies that challenge colonial epistemologies and reimagine postcolonial subject formation.
Gabriel WainioTheberge
Doctoral candidateResearch 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.
Zhuoer Zhang
Doctoral candidateResearch 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.
