I am an Assistant Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. I was previously a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from The Graduate Center, City University of New York in September 2020. ​

My primary research is in the areas of political philosophy, the history of philosophy, and environmental philosophy. I have published articles on the political economic thought of Kant, Adam Smith, and Richard Price, as well as on contemporary debates concerning the topics of agrarianism and the socialization of land. 

My current research focuses on the concept, history, and revival of the “moral economy.” The term, more commonly used by anthropologists and historians, refers to pre-industrial and agrarian economies based on subsistence production and collective uses of the land. What makes these economies “moral” is their subordination to the collective needs and governance of the community as opposed to the profit-oriented mechanisms of the free market. My book project on this topic reconstructs both the undoing of the moral economy through the political-economic thought of Adam Smith and the physiocrats in the eighteenth-century and its defense by critics of industrialization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. In addition to reconstructing the normative features of the moral economy, the book argues that the contemporary importance of reviving moral economies is an ecological one. Insofar as moral economies are oriented toward local forms of provisioning, they have a principle of sustainability built into them. For this reason, the book goes beyond standard discussions of the moral economy and other critiques of capitalism that focus more narrowly on questions of labor exploitation and wealth inequality. 

I am also co-directing a film project on the topic of "green extractivism." Here I am on The Signal, CBC Radio, discussing it.
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