Hi, I’m Cara. I am a Lecturer in the Honors Program at Loyola University Chicago, where I teach an interdisciplinary humanities “great books” course to honors undergraduates. Previously, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Colorado College. I graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of New Mexico, after defending my dissertation “Bloody Rationality: The Dialectic of Modern Reason and Sacrifice in Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer” in December 2023. I have taught a variety of undergraduate courses, including Introduction to Philosophy, Reasoning & Critical Thinking, Modern Social & Political Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Feminist Philosophies, Environmental Ethics, Psychoanalysis & Society, and Hegel’s Political Philosophy.

Though grounded in 19th- and 20th-century philosophy, my research is historical and draws from other intellectual traditions. Thematically, my work addresses the relationship between metaphysics and politics, specifically political ideology and violence, and draws from my training in German Idealism, psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and comparative philosophy from UNM, and my training in critical theory from the School of Visual Arts (where I received an M.A. in 2015). You can read my published academic research on PhilPapers and Academia.edu pages, and you can read a few public-facing publications, including a condensed version of my project on “cunning” and an (old-ish) interview with me, on the APA blog.

In addition to teaching and individual research, I’m the editor of the blog of the American Philosophical Association’s Syllabus Showcase series, and I run an interdisciplinary research group called the California Ideology Project.