In this context, my first philosophy text was Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, and my second was the first edition of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Both were formative texts, and still situate the historical and thematic concerns of my philosophical work. I combined this education with classes in physics, calculus, and chemistry.

I entered college at Southwestern University in Texas thanks to a four year tuition and expenses scholarship from the Brown foundation. I was in the unusual position of knowing that I wanted to study philosophy, a somewhat arcane discipline. I devoted four years to this study. In my second year, this included going abroad to Malta on an ISEP program. Malta was my second choice of a site for study. My first choice was Louvain (Leuven) in Belgium, a site more in line with my European philosophical interests. However, I accepted the appointment to Malta as an alternative. At that age, I was seeking the type of education that the general experience of living and working abroad would bring as much if not more than looking to conduct particular researches. This year abroad allowed me to enrich my understanding of philosophical problems in a different national context: Malta, a former British colony, had a very mixed department of religion and philosophy. My philosophical education was half Jesuit and half British analytic. Occasionally a Franciscan threw me a bone. I also studied Saussurian linguistics.

Returning to Southwestern, I finished my philosophy degree and graduated magna cum laude with honors. In my final year, I wrote a lengthy honors project in philosophy that integrated material from my other two major areas of study: feminism and the French language and culture. The project focused on the figure Emmanuel Lévinas. Feminism was a new addition to my studies in college. French was not. I had begun my study of the French language in junior high school. At the end of college, I also began to study German. As for my extracurricular life, I joined my first folk band as a backup singer.

Graduate school at The Pennsylvania State University enriched my understanding of the history of philosophy through antiquity, polished my skills in German and narrowed and refined my studies to a less scattered domain. These themes are reflected in my dissertation research, which looks at the connections between ethical and political changes and scientific and technological changes, and focuses on the figures of Karl Marx, Donna Haraway, and Georges Bataille. My singing also got better in graduate school: I mastered some percussion instruments and have been polishing my rhythm guitar, got used to smoky bars instead of pristine library couches, and was a small part of bands opening for Melissa Ferrick and Dan Byrne. Willie Nelson is right that the night life ain’t no good life.

In the fall of 2002, I returned to Southwestern University as an alumna lecturer in ethics and biomedical ethics. The two semesters at my alma mater were delightful and coincided with the guest residency of feminist scholar bell hooks. I was also able to live in Austin, Texas, the live music capital of the Southwest and participate in the John Hudson band and miscellaneous other performance events.

Under the joint auspices of a J. William Fulbright Grant and a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, I left for Europe in August of 2003. I conducting research in the archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. I made many discoveries, among them Karl Marx’s unpublished excerpt notebooks from July of 1852, on the subject of woman and paternity and those from other parts of the 1850s on technology and political economy. I returned to the United States in July of 2004 to complete the process of writing up the dissertation. I defended the dissertation on April 7, 2006, and graduated from Penn State on May 14, 2006.

In the Fall of 2006, I joined the faculty at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska as an Assistant Professor. I love to teach social theory, ethics, political philosophy, and feminism to beginners. I try to show my students the substantive questions about the good life that form the basis for their ethical and political judgments. I also try to show them the importance of understanding technology and using it in an ethical way.

In May of 2009, my first scholarly book, Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation, has come out with Palgrave Macmillan London. I am doing some new work on the connections between aesthetics and politics, and enjoying my life in Omaha, Nebraska, where I have a dog named Jackstone and a cat named Roswell.