I’m Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy with a secondary appointment at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
I’m interested in how poverty and social class shape our agency. My current work focuses on how precarity undermines our future-directed agency and the foundations of our politics. In this project, I aim to bring insights from the philosophy of action into conversation with foundational questions in political philosophy.
I recently completed a book my long-term collaborator (and best friend) Sarah Paul entitled Striving: The Agency and Epistemology of Uncertain Pursuits (Forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2027). To strive is to pursue a difficult, long-term goal in the face of uncertainty. Much of our agency is ultimately directed at complex, temporally-extended ends such as career aspirations, athletic or artistic ambitions, long-term relationships, and political goals. We often set out to pursue such ends in the knowledge that they are difficult to achieve and without knowing at the outset whether it will be within our power to succeed. Striving examines this dynamic primarily through an epistemic lens, bringing out the ways in which difficult attempts are at the same time a kind of inquiry. The driving idea is that new insights emerge for our understanding of agency, epistemology, rationality, and self-knowledge when we theorize through the lens of striving agency.
My first book, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton University Press, 2019), focuses on the ethical sacrifices that first-generation and low-income students make in pursuing upward mobility. It was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Education and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and was selected as Princeton President Eisgruber’s Pre-Read for the Class of 2025.
I’ve been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellow at the Princeton Center for Human Values, a Sara Miller McCune Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a Guggenheim Fellow. I’ve received the American Philosophical Association’s Scheffler Prize for my work in the philosophy of education.
I have held positions at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, the City College of New York, the Graduate Center–CUNY, and Swarthmore College. I received my Ph.D. from Stanford University and my A.B. from Princeton University.
I was born and grew up in Lima, Peru, where I attended Colegio Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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