My interest in people drives my work in Nietzsche studies, which focuses on (i) his philosophical psychology—especially the social formation of our emotional lives and various (negative and positive) effects of that formation; his accounts of personal transformation and self-affirmation; and the complicated relationship he proposes between flourishing, empowerment, and forms of psychic disunity, including incoherence and ambivalence—and (ii) his account of nihilism (especially psychological forms of nihilism).

My work in moral psychology and the philosophy of emotion has two main strains: (i) work on loneliness, togetherness, and belonging and (ii) work at the intersection of ethics, the philosophy of emotion, and social philosophy that explores how emotional experiences of various kinds can facilitate or hinder agency, self-formation, and/or flourishing.

I am especially absorbed by (and frankly a bit obsessed with) attending to and sketching the landscape of human need and desire. This shows up in my work on loneliness, including on the significance of feeling understood by another for beings like us: social, emotional, and valuing beings for whom these dimensions are intertwined.

My work on meaning in life explores different (sometimes competing) ways a human life can come to have meaning. I am especially interested in how certain species of meaningfulness involve being gripped or moved by something beyond our control.

My work on Nietzschean nihilism explores these themes through the lens of Nietzsche’s thought, especially how the collapse of meaning (i.e., nihilism) on Nietzsche’s view is bound up with a failure of affective life: an inability to find anything that grips or matters to us.