My teaching centers on three fundamental questions:

(1) How can I help students develop more thoughtful and effective dialogue skills? 

(2) How can I demonstrate philosophy's intellectual rigor and applied value? and

(3) How can I maintain an atmosphere where challenging ideas feel accessible and exciting?

I've been lucky enough to refine these principles during my time at UMD, both as an instructor, and in working one-on-one with students as undergraduate departmental advisor. 

I care a great deal about undergraduate teaching and learning. In my experience, employing active learning activities has been extremely helpful in helping students understand and appreciate otherwise challenging material. Some of my favorite and most effective activities are the "Snowball," and the "Index Card Pass," among others; all of which you can find and read about at Melissa Jaquart's helpful repository!

Moral Psychology (Spring 2026)

Philosophers often stress reasoning as the appropriate source for practical and moral action. Would a realistic view of human psychology undermine this assumption? This course examines recent philosophical and empirical work on the relevance of emotion and/or intuition to rationality, moral worth, and moral judgment.

Contemporary Moral Issues (Fall 2023, Summer 2024, Summer 2025, Fall 2025)

This course is designed to help students think critically about contemporary moral issues. The course content spans seven such issues: (1) cultural relativism, (2) our treatment of non-human animals, (3) global poverty and international aid, (4) virtual acts such as video gaming, (5) abortion, (6) sexual consent, and (7) implicit bias. 

Introduction to Philosophy (Fall 2024)

What does it mean for anything to be real? Is the world that we inhabit real? How do we know about reality? What is the nature of our world? Can it exist when all the humans are gone? What is the nature of the human mind? What is the nature of peace? What about questions of right and wrong, how do we decide those? Can we only evaluate actions as good or bad, or can we also evaluate human characters as good or bad? How certain can our knowledge be? Does any of this really matter? This course examines the ways in which different philosophers have tried to answer the aformentioned questions. 

Contemporary Moral Issues (Instructor: Hallie Liberto; Fall 2025)

Early Modern Philosophy (Instructor: Ben Fan; Spring 2025)

Are Sports Ethical? (Instructor: Harjit Bhogal; Spring 2023)

Bioethics: Regulating Right and Wrong (Instructor: Sam Kerstein; Fall 2022)

Arbitrating Our Bodily Rights: Consent to Sex, Medical Treatment, Body Art, Organ Donation, and Research Participation (Instructor: Hallie Liberto; Spring 2022, Fall 2021)

Know Thyself: Wisdom Through Cognitive Science (Instructor: Peter Carruthers; Fall 2020)