I majored in English and Philosophy at the University of Memphis. I obtained my Master's there as well; the focus of my study was the Holocaust; specifically, its theological roots. My PhD. is in the Humanities; my dissertation was a study of post-Holocaust ethical thought. I concern myself primarily with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian-Jewish thinker who lost much of his family during the Holocaust, but I also touch upon thinkers like Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel,...
I majored in English and Philosophy at the University of Memphis. I obtained my Master's there as well; the focus of my study was the Holocaust; specifically, its theological roots. My PhD. is in the Humanities; my dissertation was a study of post-Holocaust ethical thought. I concern myself primarily with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian-Jewish thinker who lost much of his family during the Holocaust, but I also touch upon thinkers like Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jacques Derrida, and Emil Fackenheim.
My approach to scholarship and to teaching is profoundly interdisciplinary; I believe in the interconnectedness of knowledge. The Humanities and the Sciences need one another. My dissertation, e.g., originally contained a chapter on cosmology and ethics, as the former will have a profound impact on the latter. My advisor, however, urged me to remove the chapter in order to keep things manageable. And when I taught Rhetoric at UTD, I often drew upon novels (V. Grossman), poetry (P. Celan), plays (WIesel), and essays (Thoreau) when we performed rhetorical analyses.
My teaching methodology is dialectical. I believe that truth is grasped through dialogue between peoples. Whether I have one student or thirty, I try to model the behaviors and disciplines inherent to learning Humanities: humility, questioning, and critical and analytical thinking.
