Courses Taught
At Claremont McKenna College:
In Fall 2018 I began to experiment with a new assignment structure inspired by the framework of a roleplaying game à la Dungeons and Dragons. You can read more about that experiment here and here.
I have been recognized with a faculty career mentor recognition of impact award, awarded a course innovation grant for the development of courses that address race, racism, and racial inequalities, and awarded the Glenn R. Huntoon Award in Superior Teaching. The latter was awarded on the basis of a vote of the entire CMC student body for outstanding work in the classroom.
- Advanced Seminar: Belief and other stuff (Spring 2026)
- Advanced Seminar: Belief, Evidence, and Agency (Fall 2020)
- Epistemology (Fall 2019, Spring 2023, Fall 2025)
- Freshman Humanities Seminar: Evil (Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Fall 2025, Spring 2026)
- Freshman Humanities Seminar: Race, Diversity, and Higher Education (Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023)
- Interdisciplinary Seminar: Structural Injustice (AY 2020-2021)
- Intro to Philosophy: Moral and Political Issues (Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020)
- Race and Policy (Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2022)
- Special Topics in Value Theory: Agency and Identity (Spring 2021, Fall 2023)
- What’s Wrong With Discrimination?, Central European University (Summer 2019)
- Business Ethics, University of Southern California (co-taught with Mike Ashfield, Summer 2015)
In Fall 2018 I began to experiment with a new assignment structure inspired by the framework of a roleplaying game à la Dungeons and Dragons. You can read more about that experiment here and here.
I have been recognized with a faculty career mentor recognition of impact award, awarded a course innovation grant for the development of courses that address race, racism, and racial inequalities, and awarded the Glenn R. Huntoon Award in Superior Teaching. The latter was awarded on the basis of a vote of the entire CMC student body for outstanding work in the classroom.
Outreach and Other
Humanities Labs (The Gould Center for Humanistic Studies)
Corrupt the Youth
Prison Education Project
Ethics Bootcamp
- In AY 2025-2026 I am leading a humanities lab on the topic of Spectacle and Silence: Ethics of Memory in the Digital Age.
- Lab description: This lab explores the ethical complexities of documenting, preserving, and engaging with human suffering and atrocity, particularly in the digital age. On the one hand, we have a moral responsibility to preserve a record of atrocity, but in so doing, we risk becoming tourists of tragedy, drawn in by its voyeuristic allure. Students will explore issues such as the hidden labor of content moderators, who bear the psychological toll of filtering harmful content, and question the fairness of this distribution of moral injury. Students will also explore the challenges of digital preservation, collective memory, and the manipulation of visual evidence in an era of deepfakes and algorithmic curation. How can we ethically record suffering, navigate our obligations to remember or forget, and avoid desensitization or exploitation? During the fall semester, students will read a variety of approaches to these topics from philosophy, psychology, and literature in order to understand the issues, before turning to developing individual or group projects in the spring that are intended to either highlight the complexities for a wider audience or suggest their own interventions for managing those complexities.
- Lab description: This lab explores the ethical complexities of documenting, preserving, and engaging with human suffering and atrocity, particularly in the digital age. On the one hand, we have a moral responsibility to preserve a record of atrocity, but in so doing, we risk becoming tourists of tragedy, drawn in by its voyeuristic allure. Students will explore issues such as the hidden labor of content moderators, who bear the psychological toll of filtering harmful content, and question the fairness of this distribution of moral injury. Students will also explore the challenges of digital preservation, collective memory, and the manipulation of visual evidence in an era of deepfakes and algorithmic curation. How can we ethically record suffering, navigate our obligations to remember or forget, and avoid desensitization or exploitation? During the fall semester, students will read a variety of approaches to these topics from philosophy, psychology, and literature in order to understand the issues, before turning to developing individual or group projects in the spring that are intended to either highlight the complexities for a wider audience or suggest their own interventions for managing those complexities.
- In AY 2019-2020 I led a humanities lab on the topic of expectations. Final projects completed by the students can be found here.
Corrupt the Youth
- The Los Angeles chapter of the Corrupt the Youth program is an outreach program with the mission of bringing philosophy to those who lack access to it. Philosophy offers a set of tools with which to understand, critically assess, and address the issues the students will face in their lives, and ensures that they can advocate for themselves and succeed in other environments. Through engaging in philosophical inquiry they discover and strengthen their own voices, and clarify their own thoughts and ideas.
- From 2016-2018 we worked with at-risk youth who fall between the ages of 14-24 at the Youth Education Department of the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Each month we hosted a discussion themed around "the big questions." This collaboration was started by myself, Gabbrielle Johnson, and Maegan Fairchild. It now continues under the leadership of Jesse Wilson.
- From 2019-2025 I served as a board member for the larger national organization of Corrupt the Youth, serving as chair from 2023-2025.
Prison Education Project
- In Fall 2017 I co-taught an introduction to philosophy course (introduction to ethics and big philosophical ideas) at Santa Fe Springs Custody to Community Transitional Reentry Program (CCTRP) through the Prison Education Project in collaboration with the Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics.
- The responses from the students at the end of the course have been collected in a document available here.
Ethics Bootcamp
- In partnership with the Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics, myself, Mike Ashfield, and Maegan Fairchild created an annual workshop for USC students from across majors to provide them with the resources they need to answer ethical problems that will inevitably arise as they move through their professional careers.