I am completing my dissertation in the areas of, artificial intelligence, ethics, and aesthetics under the supervision of Jesse Prinz and Noel Carroll at CUNY Graduate Center. My research interests consider the correlations between designed environments and embodied emotional engagement in both human and machine minds. I am currently a pre-doctoral research fellow with the Fay Horton Sawyer Center for Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). The Sawyer fellowship consists of a year-long research and teaching appointment. I was awarded this position to further develop my interest in philosophy of technology within a specialized institute as I complete my dissertation. This fall semester, I organized an international conference on the Ethics of Technology. 

The dissertation introduces the term “Curated Spaces”, which builds on the concept of situated cognition. Many of the environments we encounter in our daily lives are specifically designed to help us with particular tasks, and we seek out these spaces to help us achieve these goals. For instance, when you go to a grocery store, the space is designed to help you buy food. When we use the space to assist us in our goals and the space is designed with this intention, I refer to these environments as curated spaces. I refer to the kind of situated cognition in these curated spaces as “curated cognition.” This relates to work on “situated cognition,” which explores how we use external features to solve problems, but “curated cognition” draws attention to the fact that environments are often designed to impact our mental states and behavior. My dissertation demonstrates how curation is not solely found in art galleries, as the term might suggest, but that we live our daily lives in curated spaces. 

My dissertation explores different facets of how curated spaces influence our lives. One chapter concerns the experience of sound in curated spaces. Another argues that even natural spaces such as national parks are highly groomed and curated. I also argue that uncultivated spaces–those that are untouched physically by human design–will still inspire psychological responses that qualify as curated because of the history of curated experiences we have internalized. There is also a chapter dealing with social and political themes. It explores the many ways in which neighborhoods in America have been designed to control citizens, comparing middle-class America with ghettoized America. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of digital platforms curated for us by artificial intelligence, such as Netflix, Instagram, Twitter (X), and Spotify.

In the summer of 2023, I received an Arts and Science Connect Research Fellowship to travel to Paris for the summer and study psychoacoustics and technology at the IRCAM Institute. In the summer program, I learned about contemporary AI technologies used to regenerate voice and instruments, as well as how algorithms can be used to determine the precise acoustic range of instruments and voices. My time there contributed to a chapter of my dissertation. Following this work in Paris, I participated in a graduate course called Acoustics and Psychoacoustics at the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. In 2022, I received a research grant to study the emotional impact of sunlight in Norway, which contributed to a published paper on sunlight, sublimity, and the technology of moving images titled “A Reflection of the Sun” in the journal Philosophy and Film. Along with this work, in the summer of 2024, I presented a paper in Budapest at the Cognitive Science of Moving Images conference on the emotional effects of certain electrical light techniques in moving images. That paper has been accepted for publication in the Philosophy and Film journal for a 2025 volume. In these works, I argue that the human experience of light involves more than the illumination of objects in the world. We not only attend to light as a form of its own, but we also develop psychological connections to representations of light, such as emotions, temporal awareness, and religious associations. I also have a paper forthcoming in the journal Acta Philosophica Fennica, in a special volume on environmental aesthetics, which includes contributions by leaders in environmental philosophy. The paper titled “Curated Cognition in Nature” engages with contemporary work in cognitive science on gallery spaces to argue for a parallel between the curation of art spaces to that of designed natural environments such as Yellowstone National Park and Central Park. I argue that these spaces are designed to influence the emotional engagement and even the perception of visitors.