I completed my masters degree at the Humboldt-University in Berlin in 1996 and received my Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal in 2003. Before coming to UGA, I taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Middlebury College in Vermont.

My philosophical interests lie at the intersection of the history and philosophy of science, phenomenology, and philosophy of perception. My study of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology as an undergraduate and as a graduate made me aware of the intimate relationship between questions about the nature of science and the ways in which we think about pre-scientific experience. In my dissertation, I investigated more specifically the relationship between Euclid's geometric practice and pre-scientific spatial experience. I argued that the knowledge derived by means of diagram-based geometric arguments is, at least in part, grounded in the qualitative structure of perceptual space.

At the moment, I am focusing on two projects, which are both related is issues that have developed out of my dissertation. First, I am investigating the relationship between perceptual and idealized geometric concepts in Euclid's geometry with the aim of clarifying the epistemic role of diagrams therein. Secondly, I am analyzing the nature of spatial perceptual content and the way in which it is acquired. Here, I am exploring the possibilities of explaining spatial perceptual content in terms of the perceiver's practical involvement in the world.

My research is strongly rooted in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. I am interested in how developments in perception theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century historically influenced phenomenological and positivist conceptions of scientific experience. The relationship between early analytic philosophy and phenomenology has been a constant focus of both my teaching and research.

Publications:

"Edmund Husserl on the Applicability of Formal Geometry," in Intuition and the Axiomatic Method, eds. Emily Carson and Renate Huber (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp. 67-85.

"Husserl, Carnap et l'idée de la géométrie matériale," in Aux origines de la phénoménologie. Husserl et le contexte des recherches logiques, eds. Denise Fissette and Sandra Lapointe (Paris: Vrin; Laval: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 2003), pp. 41-59.