Hi! 

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I am a postdoctoral researcher with the Phlox Research Group at the University of Vienna. Before that I was a PhD student at Princeton University. You can find my CV here.

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My research is mainly in metaphysics and social philosophy. I am particularly interested in developing a metaphysical interpretation of existential quantification. My hunch is that higher-order quantification is both metaphysically indispensable and ontologically innocent and my current research tries to make sense of this idea. In related work, I defend the possibility of quantifying over absolutely everything and suggest that while it might be true that there is a smallest prime, it needn't follow that numbers belong in our ontology. My research in this area overlaps with questions in philosophical logic. 

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My work in social philosophy also focuses on ontological questions, particularly about gender. I defend a realist account of gender, according to which there are socio-metaphysical facts about an individual's gender. I am particularly interested in the ways that the tools and devices of contemporary analytic metaphysics can be fruitfully applied to social questions.

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Recently, I have also developed interests in the theoretical virtues, particularly in parsimony, which is the focus of much of my current research. In particular, I have been exploring the viability of an approach that balances the virtues of parametric accounts of parsimony, with those of the quantificational accounts that are more familiar in metaphysical contexts. If it can be made to work, such an approach would might allow us to make sense of ontologically innocent quantification—quantification that does not express existence.