Education

I recently defended (August 2022) my PhD in Philosophy at New York University. My dissertation, ‘Pictures of Feeling: Music, Meaning and Social Life’ argues that a piece of expressive music is a picture of feeling: Just as pictures represent objects and scenes by showing how they look, so too does music represent feelings by showing how they feel. Music therefore has meaning, in the ‘strict’ sense of representational content—and that meaning concerns how our lives feel to us from the inside. A study of music promises to augment our philosophical understanding of representation: what it is, how it works, and the varieties of it that exist.

I also have a PhD in musicology from the University of Cambridge. My dissertation, ‘Looking at sound: reconciling philosophical and psychological approaches to musical experience’, makes the case for greater interaction between philosophers of perception and music psychologists, and also traces the intellectual history of their mutual estrangement.

I spent a year at Rice University, Houston, TX during my Cambridge PhD, funded by a Fulbright scholarship. I worked with Casey O’Callaghan, Nico Orlandi and Charles Siewert while I was there. Before I went to Cambridge, I completed a BMus in musical performance in the CIT Cork School of Music: I studied piano performance, conducting and music technology. Before that, I completed an MA in philosophy, and a BA in philosophy and mathematics, at University College Cork.

Academic publications

‘The surprising thing about musical surprise.’ Analysis, Volume 78, Issue 2, April 2018, pp. 225–234.

‘Feeling the beat’: multimodal perception and the experience of rhythm.’ In Cheyne, P., Hamilton A., and Paddison M. (eds) (2019), The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

‘The role of expectations in musical experience.’ (co-authored with Bence Nanay) In Levinson J., Nielson N. and McCauley, T. (forthcoming), The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Teaching

I developed and delivered two undergraduate classes while at NYU. The first, ‘Minds and Machines’, was an introduction to the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. The second, ‘Life and Death in the Digital Age’, was an exploration of some of the ethical and aesthetic issues emerging from the increasing ubiquity of digital technology. We discussed death, whether an afterlife (technologically mediated or otherwise) would be desirable, and the pressure being put on experiences of value by the ‘attention economy’. We also explored the role of attention in aesthetic experience. Students completed a weekly ‘device-free walk’ and kept a record of what it was like. They also listened to Thomas Tallis’ Spem in Alium once per week, and went on a field trip to the Met, where the aim of these requirements was to explore just how much attention really is required to ‘get’ an artwork.

I have also worked as a teaching assistant for various undergraduate philosophy courses while at NYU. From Hegel to Nietzsche (John Richardson, Fall 2019) explored the philosophical views of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. I delivered a guest lecture on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and its relationship to Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Texts and Ideas (Sharon Street, Spring 2018) used a combination of literature, philosophy and poetry to explore issues surrounding attachment, loss and the passage of time. I gave a guest lecture about Walt Whitman’s use of repetition. Consciousness (Ned Block, Spring 2019 and Fall 2018) explored key issues in the philosophy of mind and consciousness.

Talks (selection)

Forthcoming

In November 2022, I will be presenting at the American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting in Portland, OR. I’ll be discussing the work of midcentury-American philosopher Susanne Langer, as part of a panel exploring the role of virtual entities in aesthetic engagement.

In January 2023, I will be serving as an invited commentator at the ‘AI and Judgment’ workshop at the Institute for Ethics in AI (Oxford).

Past

In July 2021, I gave an invited talk at the BSA-sponsored SOUND | PICTURES workshop at King’s College, London. I also delivered a lecture-performance at the conference: I used one of my own compositions as a case study for a philosophical investigation into the relationship between music and words in song.

I gave the keynote for the British Society of Aesthetics graduate student conference at the University of Durham in April 2018. I spoke about the role of bodily movement in the aesthetic appreciation of music.

I have recently given invited talks at Harvard, the Max Planck Centre for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, the University of Memphis and the University of York.

I have given many more talks besides these — see my CV.

Awards and prizes

Winner of the American Society for Aesthetics Dissertation Fellowship, 2021-22.

Winner of a Dean’s Dissertation Award (NYU), 2020.

My paper ‘The surprising thing about musical surprise’ was made open-access by Oxford University Press in recognition of the fact that it was one of the three most popular articles published in Analysis in 2018.

Winner of an NYU GRI Fellowship, Fall 2018. I spent the semester at NYU’s Paris campus.

Winner of the ‘Best paper by a graduate student’ award, British Society for Aesthetics Annual Conference, 2014.

Winner of the Fulbright Student Award in the Humanities, 2013-2014. This prize was awarded by the Irish Fulbright commission.

Robert Gardiner Memorial Scholarship, 2010-2013. (My last term at Cambridge was funded by St John’s College, Cambridge, of which I am a member.)

College Scholar award (University College Cork), in recognition of achieving first-class honours in each year of my undergraduate study.

John Smith Book Prize (University College Cork, 2004), awarded in virtue of my receiving the highest mark in the Arts faculty in my first year exams.

Second place in the 2004 Dr. H. H. Stewart Literary Scholarship in French, in recognition of achieving the second-highest results in the country’s NUI constituent colleges (UCC, UCD, NUI Galway and Maynooth) in my first year French exams.

Honan Entrance Scholarship (University College Cork, 2003): in recognition of being one of 25 students in Ireland who achieved the maximum score of 600 points in the State Leaving Certificate examination.