Hi, I’m Cara. I am an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Interdisciplinary Honors Program at Loyola University Chicago. Previously, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Colorado College from 2023-2025. I graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy with distinction 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.

At Loyola, I teach a two-semester “great books”-style lecture course to 350+ Honors first year students entitled “Western Intellectual Traditions,” and instruct smaller discussion seminars comprised of students in the lecture course. I also teach the Honors capstone course, “Moral Responsibility”. Previously, I have taught a variety of lower and upper level undergraduate Philosophy courses, including Modern Social & Political Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Environmental Ethics, Psychoanalysis & Society, and Hegel’s Political Philosophy, among others.

Though grounded in 19th- and 20th-century Continental philosophy, my research is historical and interdisciplinary. Thematically, my work addresses the relationship between metaphysics and politics, specifically political ideology and violence, and draws from my training in German Idealism, psychoanalysis, 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.

In addition to teaching and individual research, I’m the faculty supervisor of the Honors Cinema Club at Loyola, I edit American Philosophical Association blog’s Syllabus Showcase series, and I co-run an interdisciplinary research group called the California Ideology Project.