Hi, I’m Cara. I was recently hired as a Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Honors Program at Loyola University Chicago, where I will teach an interdisciplinary humanities 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 my research is grounded in philosophy, I take a broadly interdisciplinary approach and foreground the history of ideas in all of my work. 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.