How to pronounce my name:  

I came to Ohio State as Visiting Assistant Professor in 2024, after holding posts at Penn State and the University of Colorado, Boulder.  My research is on ancient Greek philosophy, focusing on Plato, the Presocratics, and Aristotle.  I am especially interested in the big metaphysical questions concerning being and fundamental reality, along with the ways that our answers to these questions inform how we live our lives.

I've published in Ancient Philosophy, Review of Metaphysics, Classical Philology, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Elenchos, and elsewhere.  A book volume I edited called Inquiring into Being: Essays on Parmenides has recently been published by SUNY Press (2025).  Currently, I'm working on a monograph about Plato's Meno, using the distinction between being and having (or, roughly, activity and property) as an interpretive framework.  I argue that Plato helps us rethink the nature of possession, showing that it entails our alignment with ways of being in the world and not material goods over which we exert domination and mastery.  I also have in-progress research projects on the Euthyphro, the Cratylus, several aspects of Parmenides' poem, the contemporary Anglo-American reception of Plato's so-called "unwritten teachings," Aristotle's view of recollection, and Democritus' understanding of soul.

Selected publications:

• Inquiring into Being: Essays on Parmenides, ed. Colin C. Smith, SUNY Press (2025), edited book volume

• Presocratic Metaphysics, special issue, Ancient Philosophy Today: Dialogoi 3:1 (2021), edited special journal issue

• “Being as Common in Plato's Theaetetus," History of Philosophy Quarterly, forthcoming (2026).

• "Plato’s Forms as Grounds,” in Ground and Fundamentality in Plato and Aristotle, ed. Richard Neels, Routledge (Studies in Metaphysics series), forthcoming.  (Invited)

• “The Continuum of Logos and Unity of Plato’s Phaedrus,” Ancient Philosophy 45:1 (2025), 129-150.

• “Parmenides’s Fragment 2 and the Meaning of Einai” and “Introduction,” in Inquiring into Being, ed. Colin C. Smith, SUNY Press (2025), 82-102 and 1-10. (Invited)

• “Empedocles on Becoming and Temporality,” in Empedocles in Sicily, ed. Jessica Elbert Decker, Jennifer Ferriss-Hill, & Heather L. Reid, Parnassos Press (2024), 39-58.

• “Being in No Way and Being in Every Way: Sophist 237b and 248e,” Epoché 29:1 (2024), 23-41.

• “Being as Communion: Sophist 247d-248b,” Review of Metaphysics 76:3 (2023), 395-423.

• “The Senses of Apeiron in Philebus 16b-27c,” Méthexis 35 (2023), 167-184.

• “Performativity and the Vitality of Discourse in Plato’s Phaedrus,” in Paideia and Performance, ed. Henry C. Curcio, Mark Ralkowski, and Heather L. Reid, Parnassos Press (2023), 163-182.

• “The Case for the 399 BCE Dramatic Date of Plato’s Cratylus,” Classical Philology 117:4 (2022), 645-661.

• “Against the Existential Reading of Euthydemus 283e-284c, with Help from the Sophist,” Ancient Philosophy 42:1 (2022), 67-81.

• “The Method of Bifurcatory Division in Plato’s Sophist,” Elenchos 42:2 (2021), 229-260.

• “Diairesis and Koinōnia in Sophist 253d1-e3,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 37:1 (2020), 1-20.

• “Toward a Two-Route Interpretation of Parmenidean Inquiry,” Epoché 24:2 (2020), 279-298.

• “Dialectical Methods and the Stoicheia Paradigm in Plato’s Trilogy and Philebus,” Plato Journal: The Journal of the International Plato Society 19 (2019), 7-23.

• “The Groundwork for Dialectic in Statesman 277a-287b,” International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 12:2 (2018), 132-150.