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'.
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 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.
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.
Brendan Brown
Doctoral candidateShubhayan 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 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.
Avery Dawson
Doctoral candidateResearch 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 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 candidate
Thomas Doerksen
Doctoral candidateResearch 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 candidateResearch 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 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.
Matthew Harker
Doctoral candidateTodd Hartley
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 candidateResearch 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 candidateSamir Khondoker
Master's candidate
Tanner Layton
Doctoral candidateResearch 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.
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.
Myles MacPherson
Master's candidateShakil Malik
Master's candidateBenjamin Maynard
Doctoral candidateJean McLachlin
Master's candidateBianca Merucci
Master's candidateLiam Morantz
Doctoral candidateJudith Muster
Doctoral candidateLennon Needham
Master's 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 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 candidateDany Prince
Master's candidateParia Rahimi
Doctoral candidateMina Rosefield
Doctoral candidateDeepro Roy
Doctoral candidateVinay Sharma
Master's 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.
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 candidateJason Stocker
Doctoral candidate
Heather Twele
Master's candidateResearch 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 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.
Gabriel WainioTheberge
Doctoral candidateAndrew Walker
Master's candidate
Al Whitney
Doctoral candidateResearch Interests / Specializations: My research interests include Heidegger, phenomenology, radical phenomenology, post-Heideggerian philosophy, and death and dying.
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).
