Research
My research focuses broadly on eighteenth-century theories of morality and emotion, especially those of David Hume and Adam Smith, and more specifically on the topics of self-control and emotion regulation, emotional sincerity and expression, virtue, moral education, gender, and aesthetics.
My published work can be accessed through my academia.edu page, or through my philpeople page.
Recent publications:
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"Resonating Strings: Understanding the Transition from Hume's Treatise to Second Enquiry," British Journal for the History of Philosophy (July 2024)
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“Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft on Gender and Self-Control," The Journal of the History of Philosophy (October 2023)
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“‘Much Better Instructors’: Adam Smith and the Role of Literature in Moral Education,” in Interpreting Adam Smith: Critical Essays (2023), Paul Sagar (ed.), Cambridge University Press
My in-progress book project, “Sentimental Education: Literary Forms in Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy,” considers the place of fictional literature, both forms and examples, in Adam Smith’s works. This project is motivated by the need to understand and hopefully resolve several problems facing Smith’s account of spectatorship and sympathy. In the first part, I show that Smithian spectators face significant obstacles to their efforts to observe, understand, and assess human character and conduct. In the second part, drawing on Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, and on other works on rhetoric and education in the latter half of the eighteenth century, I show how aesthetic theories of the moment affirm the educational powers of various literary forms. The third part offers a detailed examination of authors cited by Smith, paying special attention to the literary forms and techniques of their works. I argue both that these forms fit the model of a sentimental education through literature, and that we can see Smith himself employing some of these forms in his own moral writings. I conclude that Smith’s moral philosophy evolved alongside and occasionally in connection with the aesthetic and critical debates of his moment, as well as the developing literary forms and genres.
