I supervise at doctoral, masters and honours level, and I am glad to hear from prospective students.

What I supervise. History and philosophy of the physical sciences; early modern natural philosophy, especially Newton, Descartes, Huygens, Barrow and Leibniz; measurement, idealisation and objectivity; philosophy of physics and cosmology; women in the history of science. I also co-supervise work at the edges of my own research — recent projects have taken me into the philosophy of cosmology, the individuation of cognitive kinds in neuroscience, and the epistemology of machine learning — and I am happy to work with students whose questions sit between history and philosophy rather than squarely in one.

How I supervise. My own research on Émilie Du Châtelet has convinced me that epistemic independence is not the goal of a graduate education, and that treating it as the goal makes students worse at the thing they are actually learning. What a competent researcher acquires is the ability to depend well: knowing whom to ask, what to ask, how to read a correction, when to revise and when to hold a position, and when someone else’s authority should stop settling the question. That is what I try to teach.

In practice that means: reading drafts properly and returning them with substantive comments rather than approval; being explicit about standards instead of leaving them to be inferred; saying when something is not working and why, early enough that it can be fixed; and steadily handing over judgment, so that by the end a student is deciding what counts as a good argument rather than asking me. I take seriously that a thesis has to be sustained past the point where it stops being exciting, and much of supervision is the practical work of making that possible.

Current and recent students

Masters
Fathima Afra Mohamed Akram, Philosophical Perspectives on the Principle of Least Action (completed 2024). Nominated for the Kalbiye Tansel and Çiğdem Barçan Tansel Thesis Award; now a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh. Committee member and examiner for a further M.A. thesis.

Honours and undergraduate
Alperen Şaşmaz, Economic Forms and the Problem of Measurement — on Bernard Schmitt’s quantum macroeconomics and the ontology of economic measurement, working through Aristotle, Marx and Samuelson.

Previously: Independent research supervision at Stanford University; and, earlier, research coordinator for the Templeton undergraduate research assistants at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.

If you are thinking of writing to me. A useful first email is short and says three things: what question you want to work on, why you think it is a question, and what you have read that got you there. It does not need to be polished, and it certainly does not need to be a finished proposal — I would rather see a real problem stated roughly than a tidy one stated safely. If your interests are close to mine I will say so; if they are not, I will try to tell you who would be better, which is more useful to you than a polite yes.