I am a philosopher of mind and cognition with expertise in research on situated cognition and affectivity. My research is guided by the conviction that our cognitive and emotional states and processes actively shape, and are shaped by, our social, cultural, and technological environments, for better and for worse.

Given my training and interests, my work is informed by research in the empirical cognitive sciences and literary studies, by feminist scholarship, and by work in Artificial Intelligence. Previously, I have contributed to interdisciplinary research on reading, narrative practices, arithmetical cognition, computation, mind-wandering, and depression. 

More recently, I have pursued two lines of research. First, I have been developing a new account of the socio-cultural situatedness of self-narration. I argue that self-narration is something that we do, for example in conversation with other agents or through engaging in life writing practices. The emerging account advances our understanding of the ways in which self-narration can help us make sense of our experiences with and through others. The flipside of this is that self-narrative practices perpetuate, or actively resist, socio-cultural resources, patterns, templates, and norms that contribute to the structural oppression of certain kinds of agents. This research was funded by an ARC DECRA (09/2021-08/2024). 

Second, my research aims at understanding the influences of socio-cultural practices, norms, and technologies on grief experiences. My current focus lies on developing a descriptive account of the possible impacts of so-called deathbots, chatbots that imitate the conversational behaviour of deceased persons, on the temporal dynamics and qualitative features of grief. I argue that we need to take the variability of grief experiences, and the variability of human-chatbot interactions, into account in order to arrive at a better understanding of the promises and perils of this innovative technology.

I joined the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University in 2021. Previously, I worked in the Department of Philosophy II at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany (7/2018-8/2021). Before moving to Bochum, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany (04/2016-06/2018).

I received my PhD in philosophy (summa cum laude) at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in July 2015. My dissertation, supervised by Thomas Metzinger and Richard Menary, was awarded the Barbara Wengeler Prize 2016.

I am available to supervise post-graduate research projects in philosophy of mind and cognition, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of AI. Possible topics include self-narration, narrative practices, grief, death technologies, and chatbots based on Large Language Models.

I have co-developed, convened, and taught the unit PHIL8400: Rights, Responsibilities, and AI. 

Before joining the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University, I developed, convened, and taught seminars to students at Bachelor's and Master's levels on a wide range of topics, including: embodied cognition, mathematical cognition, neuroethics and the ethics of artificial consciousness, and virtue epistemology.