Graduate Students
The Theory Centre is currently home to over 60 full-time
Students can view a copy of the Student Assembly Constitution here.
Helen Abbot
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My research interests exist within sound studies, gender and sexuality, theories of identity/selfhood, musical ontologies, feminist musicology, narratives of resilience, research-creation and women's erotica.
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).
Christopher Austin
Doctoral candidateResearch 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".
Suhyang Baek
Doctoral candidateNicholas Birmingham
Doctoral candidate
Michael Bodkin
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My research examines the widening sense of the "third place" as branded by a popular coffeehouse. Colliding in my work are theories of space, alterity, distraction, and kitsch understood here as a culture fascinated with loss and fake mermaids. Revitalizing authors such as Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Theodor Adorno and Marc Augé, you can also find me absorbed in cultural arenas such as dark tourism, taste, camp, and Waluigi.
Chris Burke
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My main interests are in film studies, philosophy, and trans studies/theory. My dissertation brings together the writings of Stanley Cavell on genre with Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema to propose a category called “Cool Cinema,” inspired by the films and legacy of American director Nicholas Ray.
Shubhayan Chakrabarti
Doctoral candidateResearch 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
Avery Dawson
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: AOS: Critique/Metaphysics/Hermeneutics; Continental Philosophy (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault) AOC: Comparative Philosophy; Early Greek Philosophy; Ethics My research traces the liminal history of being, thinking, and speaking. I contend how we think, act, and understand ourselves is embedded in this history; disentangling these positions allows us to transformatively address our present.
Mitch De Lange
Master's candidateResearch 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 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.
Emily Dickson
Doctoral candidateThomas Doerksen
Doctoral candidate
Lucas Dvorsky
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: Avant-garde film, art, and music; extreme cinema; digital cinema; cultural studies; nostalgia; postmodernism; Adorno; psychoanalysis; Internet studies and social media
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.
Mara Gonzalez
Doctoral candidateResearch 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 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 candidateMatthew Harker
Doctoral candidate
Peter Heft
Doctoral candidateResearch 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.
Ema Hu
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'?
Junyu Ke
Doctoral candidateSpencer Kett
Master's candidate
Jennifer Komorowski
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My research focuses on a philosophy of women’s pain, psychoanalysis, and avant-garde and Indigenous women’s literature. Beginning from a core of continental philosophy, my research on masochism examines the work of scholars such as Lacan, Deleuze, and Freud and their ideas about women and pain. The Lacanian idea that women's masochism is ironic has led me to examine the idea of pain from a Haudenosaunee lens and question whether this statement holds true in other cultures, especially matriachal ones. As an Oneida scholar, I also have an interest in Indigenous literature, and just finished teaching a course on Indigenous Science Fiction at Huron University College, and will be teaching another on Indigenous Women's Resilience in the Winter 2022 term.
Daniel LeBlanc
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My work is in philosophy, critical theory, and aesthetics, with a special focus on theories of subjectivity and historical time. Current work includes a project on nature in Adorno's aesthetic theory and a project on number and dialectics.
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.
Shakil Malik
Master's candidateBenjamin Maynard
Doctoral 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.
Liam Morantz
Doctoral candidateJudith Muster
Doctoral candidate
Tyler Nash
Doctoral candidate
Elk Paauw
Doctoral candidateResearch 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.
Vikram Panchmatia
Doctoral candidateScott Pawluik
Master's candidateJevonne (Jevi) Peters
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: I'm a theorist, researcher, developer, and experimental inter-disciplinary artist. My theoretical and research-creation practice explores our individual and societal relationships with technology; privacy; governance; immersion; and speculative fiction. In my doctorate, I am expanding on my theory of hypervolition developed during my masters. I also co-lead the student-run Theory Sessions at the Theory Centre.
Anda Pleniceanu
Doctoral candidateAnnaliese Pope
Doctoral candidateSuarjan Prasai
Master's candidateMina Rosefield
Doctoral candidate
Ryan Shea
Master's candidateResearch 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.
Megan Sherritt
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.
Sean Sokolov
Master's candidate
Anna Stoutenburg
Master's candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My work lies at the intersection of postmodern philosophy, decolonial theory, and afropessimism. I explore how the history of western philosophy is so often predicated on both anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity. I specifically look at how postmodern philosophers (Derrida, Levinas) characterize violence compared with scholars in black and indigenous studies (Fanon, Wilderson, Deloria Jr.) and what this difference means for the idea of historical progress.
Heather Twele
Master's candidate
Jacob Vangeest
Doctoral candidateResearch 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.
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.
Gabriel WainioTheberge
Doctoral candidate
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.
Nathan Wiley
Doctoral candidate
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.
Tom 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).
