I currently have a monograph under construction. It asks the question what kind of person lives under capitalist realism. The Privatized Person is the result. I presented a version of the second chapter with a talk entitled “The Infinite Terror of Open Spaces” at Duquesne’s Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research in October of 2017. The above link contains a video of my presentation as well as a flyer for the talk and an honest biography.
Far out of field is a monograph tentatively called “Work Aesthetics” and explores issues of whiteness, identity, working class aesthetics, and the symbolic value of lifestyle trucks and work wear. It also has some nasty things to say about the appeal of Bruce Springsteen.
My essay “Mister Rogers’s Lesson for Democracy” is in Mister Rogers and Philosophy from Open Court Publishing. The essay explores the connection between Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood of Make Believe and the philosophical teachings of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas’s concept of the public sphere is replicated in Rogers’s the Neighborhood of Make Believe. Habermas argues that a public sphere where all people meet to make collective decisions is vital to a functioning democracy. Furthermore, the mere concept of that space is extremely vital, because we need to be able to imagine a social space where an exchanges are made between an individual’s desires and the greater good.
I have an essay in the collection Future Humans in Fiction and Film from Cambridge Scholars. My essay covers an attempt I made to teach Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887, and what I learned while failing to do so. I explore what it means to teach a futuristic utopia after the end of what was supposed to be the end of history. A significant portion of my chapter is available in the PDF sample on the Cambridge Scholars website.
Universitas Press out of Montreal saw fit to include my essay “The People I Have Pretended to Be in Order to Stay in Academia (A.K.A, The Four Types of Denial for Precarious Academics)” in their collection Specialists: Passions and Careers. The essay is a critical look at myself and the attitudes I have adopted in the face of a collapsing academic job system.
My essay on the teachings of Erich Fromm in the works of Virginia Woolf and George Orwell entitled “Necrophilia on Holiday: Constriction of Discourse and the Male Burden of non-“Z-men” in To the Lighthouse’s Mr. Ramsay and Coming Up for Air’s George Bowling” can be found in the EAPSU Online Journal of Critical and Creative Work Volume 2 from the Fall of 2005. This essay specifically discusses Mr. Ramsay from To the Lighthouse and George Bowling from the underrated Coming Up for Air as figures struggling with masculine expectations under the face of modernity. It appears on page 53 of the pdf.
A long time ago I wrote a review of Richard M. Gale’s The Philosophy of William James in Studies in the Humanities Issue 31 December 2004.