Graduate Fellows
Senior Graduate Fellows
Rachel Keith
Rachel is a fifth-year PhD student in the USC philosophy department. At this point in her career, she has broad interests spanning moral philosophy, philosophy of law, and philosophy of science. She is excited to be working with CFCP and hopes to explore how an understanding of conflict affects special moral obligations (such as those towards family members). She is also optimistic that a more thorough understanding of conflict will have implications for discussions surrounding culpability in the legal sphere, but has yet to fully develop her ideas here.
Matthew Wiseman
Matt is a fifth-year PhD student in the philosophy department at USC, working primarily in moral and political philosophy. He’s particularly interested in our individual and collective duties to future generations and nonhuman animals and how these duties should make us both rethink the foundations of democratic theory and reform our political institutions.
Graduate Fellows
Zeb Dempsey
Zeb is a third-year PhD student at USC with broad research interests in moral psychology and political philosophy. His recent research has focused on the nature of anger, especially in situations involving non-culpable harm, and on the role anger plays in re-shaping conversational power dynamics. More generally, Zeb is interested in what role emotions play and what role they ought to play in our social lives, our communicative spaces, and our political institutions.
Megha Devraj
Megha is a PhD candidate in philosophy. She works in philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of mind. She is particularly interested in communicative acts that seem aimed at sparking emotional and imaginative responses in their interlocutors: these include protests, performance art, and some forms of interpersonal speech.
Ariel Gordy
Ariel is a first year PhD student with key interests in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of law. She has previously worked on problems assessing the efficacy of shaming punishments as a means of conflict resolution within interpersonal relationships and on how shaming punishments have been deployed by legal systems in order to prevent future criminal offenses.
Laura Gurskey
Laura is a PhD student at USC, with research interests in metaethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy. She is particularly interested in conflicts that emerge between liberal states and groups that possess religious or cultural identities that supersede their commitment to the liberal project. She is also interested in exploring the extent to which sustained moral disagreement is a necessary feature of the preservation of cultural diversity.
June Lee
June is a first-year PhD student at USC working in epistemology, moral philosophy, and metaethics. She is particularly interested in topics in applied epistemology, such as ignorance, bias, belief perseverance, rational disagreement, and polarization. More recently, she has been thinking about how the discordance among an agent’s beliefs or attitudes may influence or manifest as interpersonal conflicts in political, social, and other institutional contexts.
Nurit Matuk Blaustein
Nurit is interested in political philosophy and metaethics. Among other things, she is studying and evaluating different solutions to moral conflicts in which sides have sets of desires that cannot both be satisfied, like conflicts about taxation, abortion or immigration. She wants to figure out, in particular, the limits of liberals' procedural solutions and whether such limits point to more promising alternatives, like fighting for a society that promotes a shared conception of the good.
Anthony Nguyen
Anthony is a PhD candidate in philosophy. His primary research interests are in political philosophy, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. His main research project is on colonialism and how it and its necessary injustice may be better understood by appealing to what Rawls called 'the social bases of self-respect'.
Laura Nicoara
Laura is a PhD candidate working in social ontology, feminist philosophy, and aesthetics. She is interested in the nature of social and institutional norms, and in how they help shape our social identities and interactions with one another.
Yasha Sapir
Yasha is a fourth-year PhD student. He is currently thinking a lot about complicity: about why certain speech acts can leave us feeling complicit, and about the connection between complicity and causal responsibility. Yasha also has other relevant interests, including interests related to derogatory language and propaganda.
Aaron Suduiko
Aaron is a first-year PhD student at USC interested in the relationship between individuals’ personal experiences and values. He believes that philosophy can equip people to express, to themselves and others, how their lives lead them to recognize particular narratives, explanations, and norms as relevant to themselves and others. He hopes that such forms of expression can help make interpersonal conflict more productive.
Nathan Tsang
Nathan is a third-year PhD student, focusing his research on political sociology, social movement studies, and cultural sociology. His recent project investigates the (de)politicization of cultural preservation in diasporic organizing. More broadly, he is interested in how communication and everyday interactions in civic life blur and redefine the boundaries between culture and politics.
Shu Wang
Shu takes a major interest in the philosophy of personhood, and he aims at developing a practically-based view of personhood, where facts about personhood are inherently connected to person-related practices. Thus, he is interested in interpersonal conflict insofar as it is one important dimension of person-related practices. He hopes to develop the thesis that to be a person is partly to be capable of and a fitting participant of interpersonal conflicts.