About me
I am an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of Philosophy, where I work in the philosophy of cognitive science. Throughout 2024, I’m pursuing an NEH fellowship titled, “The Spontaneity Deficit: Good Minds in the Age of Distraction.” That project has split off into two books about the nature and value of attention and distraction: The Spontaneity Deficit focuses on the moral psychological impact of digital technologies (especially AI-based recommender systems), whereas The Wandering Mind develops a theory of the nature and norms of attention.
Much of my work develops a nascent field of study: the philosophy of mind-wandering. Mind-wandering occupies up to half of our waking thoughts and has emerged as a leading topic in cognitive science. Yet this flurry of progress was not tethered to philosophical foundations. My work fills that gap, providing philosophical, scientific, and normative foundations for the study of mind-wandering, attention, and distraction.
