I am currently a 6th-year PhD Candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Notre Dame, with minors in Gender Studies and Screen Cultures. Prior to joining ND, I completed an Honours Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 2020 at the University of Toronto.
I am a metaphysician interested in what becomes possible once fragmentation, rather than unity, is treated as a fundamental ontological condition. Philosophy has traditionally sought unity: a unified world, a unified subject, and a unified social order. My research begins from the contrary intuition that fragmentation is not merely a defect to be overcome, but a constitutive feature of reality, subjectivity, and social life. Drawing on analytic metaphysics, continental philosophy, and queer theory, I develop metaphysical frameworks capable of describing forms of reality and subjectivity that resist reduction to coherent unities. This question currently unfolds across two interconnected projects:
Fragmentation of the World is an analytic metaphysics project, co-supervised by Kris McDaniel and Sara Bernstein, on how the world is fragmented and how our metaphysical theories should, accordingly, be pluralistic. Inspired by Spinoza’s Parallelism and María Lugones’s Latinx World-Traveling, my dissertation develops an account I call fragmentalism: a realist pluralist metametaphysical position, according to which the world admits of multiple privileged languages that are mutually incommensurable. In particular, Chapter 1 “An Invitation to the Fragmented World” introduces fragmentalism as a new realist alternative to the prevailing opposition between Neo-Carnapian anti-realism and Siderean realism in contemporary metametaphysics; Chapter 3 “Towards a Queer Metaphysics” develops fragmentalism as a realist and pluralist foundation for social metaphysics, allowing metaphysics to be both descriptive and emancipatory.
Fragmentation of the Self is a continental metaphysics project on how the self emerges through fragmentation. It begins from the problem that many Global South queer subjects, Asian diasporic subjects, and neuroqueer subjects lack access to the communal forms of recognition through which dominant queer subjectivity is often understood to emerge. I argue that this absence does not mark a failed sociality, but becomes an ontological condition for non-normative subject-formation. Drawing on Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of melancholia and post-structuralist metaphysics of fragmentation, I develop a metaphysical account of the self that is both constituted and fragmented by melancholic introjection.