Graduate Fellows

Senior Graduate Fellows

Jennifer Foster

Jennifer is a PhD student working at the intersections of political/social philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Her current project involves the nature of stereotypical thought, especially as activated and deployed in political discourse contexts. Inspired by trends of increased political polarization, Jennifer seeks to better understand the ways in which stereotypes affect how we think (or fail to think) about the political claims of others, and how “mismatches” in the stereotypical beliefs or associations of different people can lead to seemingly intractable conflicts. Once we’re in such conflicts, moreover, Jennifer is interested in whether––and if so, how––we can successfully get ourselves out. 

Paul Garafalo

Paul is a PhD student in the USC philosophy department. His research is primarily in political philosophy and the history of political philosophy (specifically Hobbes). His work in political philosophy focuses on maintaining state legitimacy in the face of disagreement between parties in the state. 

Andrew Stewart

Andrew is a sixth-year graduate student, with research interests in political philosophy, ethics (including metaethics), and the history of philosophy. Questions that he is currently thinking about include: which types of conflict political philosophers ought to be concerned with, how much space there is for conflict to emerge under just institutions, and the relationship between interpersonal conflict and social inequality.

Graduate Fellows

Anja Chivukula

Anja works in philosophy of language, cognitive science and feminist theory. She is interested in the relationship between language use, concept formation, and social hierarchies. Currently, she is thinking about how innocuous words and phrases used in everyday, unmarked speech might partially constitute the social ideologies shaping our world.

Zeb Dempsey

Zeb is a first-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 fourth-year PhD student with interests in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social and political philosophy. She is interested in how we communicate by performing collective speech acts such as protest or commemoration. Recently, she has been thinking about acts that involve communicatively defying an authority (like civil disobedience), and how they can contribute to making our socio-political norms more cooperative.

Charlotte Figueroa

Charlotte is a fifth-year PhD student with interests in feminist philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Recently, she has been thinking about questions around the value of empathy and how art, and its changing technological landscape, interacts with our relationships with others. She is also interested in topics surrounding prison abolition, the ethics of procreation, and duties toward non-violent resistance (i.e., whether we have absolute duties of pacificism or if violent resistance is sometimes morally required). 

Laura Gurskey

Laura is a fourth-year 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.

Yuanye Hu

Yuanye is a first-year PhD student in the philosophy department at USC, working primarily in epistemology. She is particularly interested in how our opinions are shaped by certain social, political, and cultural backgrounds, and how we should rationally treat our opinions given that they have been so shaped. She is also thinking about epistemic conflicts among people from different backgrounds: Are our opinions genuinely conflicting if we consider the different backgrounds? How should we update our own opinions on these conflicting opinions? How should we aggregate these conflicting opinions to have a collective opinion?

Rachel Keith

Rachel is a third-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.

Anthony Nguyen

Anthony is a fifth-year PhD student with research interests in political philosophy, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. He is working on a couple projects related to conflict. First, he is investigating the necessary wrong of colonialism, which he argues has to do with social domination and the attendant threat to colonized peoples' self-respect. Second, he is developing a Gricean approach to implicatures in adversarial conversations. He argues that in adversarial contexts, conversational cooperation and interpersonal conflict interact to explain why ostensibly non-cooperative speakers can still implicate things.

Laura Nicoara

Laura is a fifth-year PhD student working primarily in ethics, aesthetics and feminist philosophy. She is interested in the systemic and institutional dimensions of conflict, principally from a radical feminist perspective. In particular, she would like to investigate how we can best spell out the relation between, on the one hand, structural (gender- or class-based, racial, etc) conflicts, and, on the other hand, the small-scale interpersonal interactions between individuals belonging to the oppressed/oppressor groups, especially when the latter are not perceived by the participants as involving any overt hostility.

Yasha Sapir

Yasha is a second-year PhD student. He is currently investigating what it takes for a question to count as settled. This question is significant, because many debates center on whether a question has been settled or whether it's fair game for further investigation. Yasha also has other relevant research projects, including projects related to blame, derogatory language, and propaganda.

Levy Wang

Levy is a 4th-year PhD student interested in the nature of normativity and rationality. She is particularly interested in the relation between reasons for action and reasons for belief. Many epistemologies have worked on the problem of peer disagreement - what we should do when we find out that our epistemic peers hold beliefs that conflict with ours. But Levy is motivated by a suspicion that traditional theories in epistemology like evidentialism are not equipped to solve this problem. Rather, we need to consider reasons for belief beyond mere evidence in order to understand the dynamics of this kind of epistemic conflict.

Phoenix Wang

Phoenix is a first-year philosophy PhD student whose main focus lies within metaethics, moral psychology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In particular, she is interested in working at the intersection of metaethics and philosophy of cognitive science, which entails the question of moral conflict (or dilemma) and ethical consistency (different conceptions of consistency, e.g.,model-theoretic, rule-theoretic, etc.). Moreover, she hopes to continue exploring the conflicting nature of attributability and accountability in assessing blame and punishment in controversial cases of psychopathic wrongdoers.

Nadja Winning

Nadja is a second-year PhD student in the philosophy department. She is particularly interested in ethics, as well as meta-ethics and feminist philosophy. At the moment, she is thinking about situations in which persons contribute to their own oppression, and how the oppressive circumstances surrounding such choices impact assessments of moral worth.