About
Throughout the course of my research career, I have engaged with key critical thinkers in the European literary and philosophical tradition on the topic of the relationship between humans and animals such as Franz Kafka, Giorgio Agamben, Theodor Adorno, and Giacomo Leopardi. By examining the way this damaged relationship has facilitated harm and impacted our relationship with the natural world, my work has since developed to focus on the costs of the separation, which is now increasingly being subjected to critique by the contemporary scientific community between people and nature. In my book, I examined how thinkers such as Aleksandr Ėtkind in Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (2021) and Sebastiano Timpanaro in On Materialism (1979) argued that the Lisbon Earthquake initiated a shift in the European mindset concerning the relationship between people and nature that continues to reverberate today.
I am also passionate about research ethics and management, and advancing equity in scholarly publishing. Education
PhD, Philosophy | Kingston University, London, UK | 2013-2021
Dissertation: ‘Philosophical Fables for Ecological Thinking’
PGCILT, Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching (Merit) | University of London, London, UK | 2019
BA, Humanities MA, Cultural and Critical Theory (Merit) | University of Brighton, Brighton, UK | 2013
Dissertation: Adorno and Agamben on Humans, Animals and Kafka
BA, Humanities (First Class) | University of Brighton, Brighton, UK | 2008-2012
Dissertation: An Examination and Comparison of the Way Absurdity and Alienation and are Expressed in Sartre’s Nausea and Camus’s The Outsider Projects
Works in Progress:
• Contribution to the publication Momentary Monument – Prospective Lexicon: ‘planetary unity’
• (2025), ‘Unity in a Planetary Crisis: A Return to Giacomo Leopardi’s Critique of Modern European Culture’, Journal of Italian Philosophy
• ‘Natural Disasters, Philosophy, and Separation’, Configurations, ‘Out of the Past’ Special Issue
• AHRC/Harry Ransom Center Visiting Fellowship
• Book Proposal for MIT Press’s Imagination, Annotated series and UCL Press
Upcoming Talks and Conferences
2025: ‘Thinking in Accordance with Nature: Turning to Stoic Thought for Planetary Flourishing’, Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton
2025: The Roots of a Western Classical Biocentric Tradition and its Environmental Consequences, New School of the Anthropocene (NSOTA), London
Previous talks given and conferences attend include:
2024 Natural Disasters, Philosophy, and Separation, 37th Annual Conference of Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), Dallas, Texas
2023 From cosmic philosophy to planetary humanism- revisiting Leopardi’s critique of our alienation from ourselves and nature, 36th Annual Conference of SLSA, Arizona State University
2022 Human Exceptionalism and the Fable, Ahuman Futures Panel, Derrida Today, Arizona State University, Washington DC
2021 Distilling an Ethics from Leopardi’s poetry, Contaminations – Leopardi and the Modern Self from Romanticism to Modernism, Centre of Leopardi Studies, Oxford University
2020 The fable as the ‘life story’: A generative resource for imagining alternative narratives, relations and practices in an age of crisis, European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSAeu) Conference, ‘Anthropocene(s): Reworking the Wound’, online
2019 Disenchantment in Leopardi’s Philosophical Thought: Illusion and the Imagination, Society for European Philosophy Joint Conference with the Forum for European Philosophy, Royal Holloway
2019 Philosophical Fables for the Environmental Crisis, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy Graduate Conference, Kingston University
2019 The Philosophical Fable as a Site of Truth: Examining Leopardi and Nietzsche, Philosophy, Politics and Ethics in Contention Conference by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton
2018 Philosophical Fables in the End Times: Reading Leopardi’s Ecological Warnings, Commission of Science and Literature Conference, Sorbonne Université
2017 Reflecting on Nature’s Destructive Power, through Giacomo Leopardi’s ‘Broom, or Flower of the Wilderness, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference SLSA 2017: ‘Out of Time’, Arizona State University
2017 Giacomo Leopardi’s Non-Human Characters’ Experience within a Post-Human Landscape, Experiencing the Posthuman- PostHuman Network First Conference, Arizona State University
2012 Adorno on Experience and Instrumentalisation Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton Memberships
I am an active member of a number of scholarly societies and communities, including:
• British Academy’s Early Career Network – currently working on the British Academy’s Publishing ThinkIn Group’s ‘ECR Publishing Hacks’ zine project
• Part of the experimental teaching ensemble of the New School of the Anthropocene (
NSOTA)
• Active within the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) and British Society of Literature, Science and the Arts (BSLS), and British Society of Aesthetics (BSA)
