I am an interdisciplinary researcher, practitioner, and composer. My research interests include: sound, aesthetics, ontology (Western/non-Western), sonic ecology, critical musicology (ambient, extreme metal, noise, drone, improvisation), ecocriticism, feminism, gender studies, modernity, modernism, the Anthropocene, speculative realism, posthumanism, time, postphenomenology, hermeneutics, poetics, and resonance.
I currently work as a part-time Lecturer in Aesthetics, Fine Art, and Phenomenology at York St John University, North Yorkshire, England. This follows a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship within the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute (LAHRI) at the University of Leeds (2023-2024).
My work is concerned with ontology conceived of as if it were sonic, rather than, as I claim is commonplace in the history of Western thinking, metaphorised as visual. I explore methods for retuning classic metaphysical inquiry, via an aesthetics of sound, in a manner that disrupts Western philosophy’s anthropocentrism (and its facilitative grammar of visualism), in pursuit of an ontological democracy. I have published in "The Modernist Review", "Open Philosophy", "Caietele Echinox", "KronoScope: Journal for the Study of Time", and "CePRA Journal". I have presented research papers at national and international conferences in York, Leeds, London, Bucharest, and Copenhagen. I compose blackened “ambient grindcore” and experimental drone metal as Hermetic Abyss, which acts as a site of practice for his theoretical research.
I undertook both my BA in Journalism and Media (1999) and my MA in Cultural Studies (2011) at the University of Leeds, before completing my PhD in 2023 in the School of Music (also at U of Leeds), supervised by Professor Martin Iddon and Dr James Mooney.
My thesis, titled "Auditioning Ontology: Towards an Ambient Metaphysics", investigates post-Enlightenment philosophy’s engagement with the nature of reality, employing sound as an ontological starting place, to provide a critical perspective on Western thought’s tendency to privilege presence over absence, on the grounds that its primarily visualist grammar perpetuates a problematic anthropological bias. It does so by systematically examining ontologies of substance (via Graham Harman) and process (via Jean-Luc Nancy) as they emerge from Martin Heidegger, through my methodology of "auditioning", which I define as ontologising through audition, inquiring as to the nature of being via the aesthetics of sonority. The exposition of what I call "ambient metaphysics" introduces a third stream of realism, between substance and process, capable of theorising the nature of being via the democracy of sonic aesthetics like reverberation and vibrancy. By making explicit the capacities for metaphysical articulation through ‘sound’ that are implicit in Harman, Nancy, and Heidegger, my thesis interrogates the possibility of an aestheticisation of being through sonority. In so doing, it suggests new and productive ways for realism to apprehend the nature of reality, beyond philosophy’s restrictive anthropo-ocularcentrism.
