About
Some of you will be able to tell immediately upon meeting me that I am a Southerner. I hail from a small South Alabama town known as Fairhope, Alabama. Fairhope was founded by a Georgist splinter group in 1894. Georgists, if you don’t know, maintain that the deleterious effects of social inequality can be repaired largely through the public ownership and management of land, but they remain quite libertarian with respect to labor and capital; for this reason, Georgist settlers saw themselves as establishing a single tax colony. To this day, the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation owns much of the land within the old city limits. Given this history, I suppose it is fitting that I decided to become a political philosopher.
My grandparents and mother were educators in an area not terribly interested in education, my grandmother having earned a PhD in education at a time when most Southern women had probably never imagined the option. I love my home, but I was happy to leave. I graduated high school in 2000, leaving for Washington University in St. Louis to study physics. As you can tell, this did not last. I left Wash U a philosopher-in-training (with a PNP degree, no less!). I was lucky enough to spend a year from ’04-’05 studying philosophy of religion at St. Louis University in the philosophy department. I then transferred to Arizona, where I spent the last six years learning from the grandmasters of contemporary political philosophy, including Dave, Tom and Jerry (not that Tom and Jerry). Jerry graciously took up the burden of advising me.
Over the last six years, I have learned a variety of new practices, including weight-lifting, biking, two instances of) landscaping, and reading stuff most analytic political philosophers find obscure. I was alsofortunate enough to marry my best friend from Fairhope, Alicia. As a reward for marrying me, I immediately dragged her out to the barren wasteland, devoid of water and grass, known as Tucson. Alicia currently does the hero’s work of counseling disadvantaged youths in Tucson’s inner city. We have a nice little home here that we share with our two adorable Shih Tzu puppies, Rachy and Ruby. We’ve also recently taken up watching the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Movies and share a passion for The Golden Girls. It is a great life.
In the fall, Alicia and I will move to Providence, Rhode Island where I’ll take up a post-doctoral position at Brown University’s Political Theory Project. We love Tucson, but we’re excited about our next step. I am particularly excited to move to the home of Roger Williams, one of my heroes, though my views on Williams are shaped more by this than what you might expect. The year after that Alicia and I will move to Bowling Green, OH where I will proudly join BGSU’s philosophy department as an Assistant Professor.
