Faculty

I am a philosopher, cultural theorist, and curator of visual and sonic art. An interest in contemporary art led me to 19th through 21st century European philosophy, which I have taught and written about for many years along with wider topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and social and political philosophy. Since the mid-1990s, I have written on music and art for magazines such as Artforum and The Wire, and have curated exhibitions at The Kitchen, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Artists Institute, and other venues. I am editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine and received an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation. I teach courses on power, posthumanism, audio culture, sound art, photography, relativism and realism, philosophy as a way of life, and many other topics in contemporary thought and culture.

PhD, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz

BA, Modern Culture & Media, Brown University

Books:

Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

Realism Materialism Art (edited with Jenny Jaskey and Suhail Malik) (Sternberg, 2015)

Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (edited with Daniel Warner) (Bloomsbury, 2017/2004)

Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California Press, 1999)

Recent Essays

"Preposterous Realism and Posthuman Aesthetics." In The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms, ed. Katherine Bowers and Margarita Vaysman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

"Sound Art and Time." In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, ed. Jane Grant, John Matthias, and David Prior. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

"The Politics of Sound: Flows, Codes, and Capture." Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, 1, no. 3 (2020).

"The Author as Selector: Tony Cokes' Iconoclasm." In Tony Cokes: If UR Reading This It's 2 Late. London: Goldsmiths, 2019.

"Sound Art in America: Cage and Beyond." In Sound Art, ed. Peter Weibel and Linnea Semmerling. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.