Our Graduates Go Places (Randi Version)

James Steinhoff

James completed his BA in English Language and Literature and Philosophy at The University of Windsor in 2010. In 2012, he completed his MA in philosophy at The University of Windsor. In 2014, he began the PhD program in Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario and currently holds funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). His doctoral research focuses on developing a political economy of machine learning and artificial intelligence. He has published on the connections between transhumanist and Marxist philosophy and has presented papers at numerous international conferences.

Blake Scott

Blake Scott completed his B.A. Honours in Philosophy in 2015 and his M.A. in Philosophy in 2017. He has since begun a PhD in Philosophy at the KU Leuven in Belgium. His research interests include social and political philosophy, phenomenology, critical theory, and rhetoric.

During his time at the University of Windsor, Blake received an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, published an article in Sartre Studies International entitled “Sartre, Lacan, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis: A Defense of Lacanian Responsibility”, co-authored a book review with Curtis Hyra and Dr. Christopher Tindale, and attended nine academic conferences. Blake was also invited to present his research at the annual Martin Wesley Lecture Series oraganized by the Humanities Research Group.

Lucas Wentzell

Lucas completed a BA (H) Sociology degree at the University of Windsor before joining the Philosophy MA program in 2012.  His interests include the philosophy of the social sciences, traditional philosophy of science, existentialism and Heidegger in particular, human nature, virtue ethics and ‘first philosophy’.  Lucas will tell you his time in the MA program served as an invaluable step in his personal development and preparation for future academic and non-academic pursuits.  Philosophy encompasses more than an academic interest to him – it fosters the growth and flourishing of a virtuous soul. 

Following the completion of his MA Philosophy degree, Lucas was admitted to McMaster’s PhD program.  He left this program to pursue a JD degree at Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law, which he is set to begin Fall 2016.  He intends to return to academic philosophy in the future, though he will always live by Kant’s Enlightenment challenge to ‘dare to know’. 

Outside of academia, Lucas is dedicated to his personal interests which include music, writing poetry and short stories, and boxing.

Laura Nicola

Laura Nicola was born in 1990 in Ivrea, a small town located near Torino (Italy). In 1995 Laura moved to Rome, where she lived with her parents and twin brother Stefano until 2009, when she relocated to Ontario to pursue her academic goals. From there she went on to the University of Windsor, where she graduated with distinction in 2013, obtaining a B.A. in Classical Civilization and Philosophy.  In April 2015 Laura successfully completed a Master of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Windsor, with a Major Paper titled “Affirming Authenticity, Seeking Recognition. A Critical Account of Social and Personal Identity”.  In September 2015 she will further continue her academic career by pursuing a J.D. at the University of Windsor.

Catalin Mitelut

Catalin received his B.Sc. (Honours, Physics and Philosophy, 1999), M.Sc. (Physics, 2001) and M.A. (Philosophy, 2012) from University of Windsor.  University of Windsor and the Department of Philosophy provided unique opportunities and the encouragement for enrolling in cross-disciplinary curricula and Catalin is forever grateful for the university support over the many years of enrolment.  His M.A. thesis, supervised by Dr. Christopher Tindale, investigated the reductionist idea that the principles of Aristotelian rhetoric have scientific explanations.  For his M.Sc. thesis, completed under the supervision of Dr. Gordon Drake, Catalin carried out high-precision calculations of quantum mechanical effects that contribute to the spectra of few body atomic systems.

In 2004 Catalin completed his J.D. at University of British Columbia (UBC) and was called to the bar of BC in 2005. He practiced refugee and asylum law at Mitelut & Company and appeared in the Federal Court and at all levels of the Immigration and Refugee Board.  Among his clients over the years were several of the MV Sun Sea Tamil migrants who arrived on the coast of BC in August of 2010. 

Catalin is currently a PhD student in the neuroscience department at UBC.  He is researching problems of coding in the visual cortex and dendritogenesis in developmental neuroscience.  He continues to be interested in philosophical problems, such as the neuroscience supported idea that we lack free will; he is particularly interested in what will be uncovered by a 21st century scientifically informed philosophical inquiry into free will.

Chris Genovesi

Mr. Chris Genovesi completed his BA [H] in 2010, double majoring in Philosophy and Language and Literature. In 2012, he completed his MA in Philosophy, focusing on issues of Mind, Language, Narrativity and their intersections with the cognitive sciences. Throughout his academic career, Mr. Genovesi has presented at multiple conferences on a wide array of subjects, including mental health, ethics in clinical psychiatry, rationality, narrative identity, linguistics, and the philosophical merit(s) of figurative speech.

Mr. Genovesi was afforded the opportunity to study in Riga, Latvia, attending the fourth annual “Graduate International Summer School in Cognitive Science and Semantics”. Currently, Mr. Genovesi is pursuing a PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Carleton in Ottawa, Ontario, holding an internal scholarship awarded by the University. His research focuses on figurative language processing, comprehension, and manipulation.  With it, he hopes to contribute to the discourse on metaphoricity and psycholinguistics.

Sandra DeVries

Ms. DeVries [Vreugdenhil] received her BA from St. Stephen’s University in St. Stephen, NB and she begins doctoral studies at the University of Waterloo in September 2013. Sandra's SSHRC funded MA research at Windsor focuses on the connections between testimony, social epistemology and Sen’s ideas of justice in a transitional context.  Her work acts as a criticism of the traditional, institutional model of justice as exclusionary toward testimonies and considerations of situated, phenomenal experiences provoked by the implementation of certain laws. Placing an emphasis on an ideal of justice, as opposed to the emergent capabilities and experiences of laws, the institutional model effectively reduces the ability of members of the judiciary and citizens alike to recognize ways in which the same policies that they might consider just act as injustice to people who live under the same laws, but under different personal circumstances.

Sandra brings her research to examine the practices of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, with a goal of understanding the effects of the residential schools through the stories of those who were victimized by Canadian policy. It is her hope that the development of a more robust inclusion of testimony to the accounts of the TRC which are made available to the public will result in a better understanding and the growth of new policies which will enable not only truth, but a reduction of injustice, both present and future.

Justin Morris

Mr. Morris received his B.A. (Hon.) in 2011, and is slated to complete his M.A. in Philosophy at the University of Windsor in Summer 2013. Under the supervision of Dr. Philip Rose, his major paper investigates the possibility of developing a nonanthropocentric dialogical interspecies ethic through an ecofeminist lens. As a Master’s student at Windsor, Mr. Morris’s research benefitted from the support of an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and two consecutive graduate student fellowships at CRRAR, where he most recently presented a paper entitled “A Gendered Analysis of Rhetorical Argumentation”. He will present at the upcoming tenth meeting of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA) (“Narrative, Intersectionality and Argumentative Discourse”) and has participated in a number of conferences in the past, including Concordia and McGill’s The Status of Minorities in Philosophy Graduate Conference and Workshop (“An Empathetically Engaged Approach to Argumentative Exchange”) and Waterloo’s Annual Graduate Conference in Philosophy (“Empathetic Engagement as an Epistemic Responsibility”). He will begin his PhD studies in Fall 2013 at McMaster University with the support of an OGS doctoral scholarship.  

Jamie Sewell

Ms. Sewell's current research focusses on the intersections among feminist critiques of pedagogical ideals and practices, philosophies of education, and critical thinking. Her MA thesis work is funded by SSHRC and entitled “bell hooks on Engaged Pedagogy: Critiques and Constructions of Teaching Practices concerning Critical Thinking”. She critiques ideals and practices of teaching that reinforce systems of domination and/or exclusion, while exploring hooks’ account of practices which she suggests can lead to positive social and political action.

Ms. Sewell's aim, with the completion of this project, is to point to possible avenues by which learning communities within Canada can move away from a ‘banking-system’ of education (as described by Paulo Freire), and toward a system of education that represents values of inclusion and justice; a system which concentrates on critical thinking and development from within, rather than ‘producing’ graduates by imposition from without. Her general interests are in feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, critical theory, philosophy of education, and Eastern philosophy (especially Taoism and Zen Buddhism).

Laura Benacquista

Ms. Benacquista holds a B.A. (H) and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Windsor, completed in 2012. She spent a semester as a student fellow of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR). She also received a SSHRC Master’s Scholarship, and a SSHRC Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement with which she spent a semester as a Visiting Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, in The Netherlands. Her paper “Moot Points, Generalities and the Rhetorical Creation of Social Knowledge” was accepted for publication in the forthcoming collection Etudes sur L’Épistémologie de la Rhétorique (2013, Nota Bene). She will present her work in argumentation studies at the tenth meeting of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA): Virtues of Argumentation, in May 2013. In Fall 2012, she began her Ph.D. in Philosophy at McMaster University where she is conducting research on Hannah Arendt’s political theory and human rights.

Dean Goorden

Mr. Goorden finished his BA at Griffith University (Australia) and BA Hons at University of Queensland (Australia).  His MA at Windsor was completed in 2010. Since then, he has worked as a Research Assistant for CRRAR and the Academic Integrity Office; he has also worked as an Instructor within the School of Computer Science.  He has presented conference papers at the Windsor's Graduate Student Philosophy Conference ("Comparative Analysis: Luce Irigaray and Shannon Sullivan") and the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation ("Conductive Arguments and 'The Inference to the Best Explanation'").  Some work Mr. Goorden did during his MA at Windsor is now being published in Ratio Juris, entitled "Dworkin and the Phenomenology of the 'Pre-legal'?".  He is now at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, doing a pre-doctoral year (MPhil) which he plans to follow with a PhD.  His PhD project is tentatively titled 'Philosophy of Technology: the Internet and the Body'.

Andrew Ball

Mr. Ball completed his MA in May of 2011 after completing undergraduate studies in philosophy 'across the river' at the University of Detroit Mercy. His MA major paper was advised by Professor Guarini and is entitled: "Animal and Reflective Knowledge: Defending the Distinction in the Thought of Ernest Sosa."  While a student at Windsor, he presented papers at various conferences including Kent State University's Annual Graduate Student Philosophy Conference ("Another Perspective on Plantinga's De Jure Attitude: A Response to Ferreira"), SUNY Albany's Graduate Student Philosophy Conference on Metaphysics ("The Importance of Others for Identity: A Response to Parfit"), as well as to Windsor's Graduate Student Philosophy Conference ("Brains, Bodies, and Brandom: a Social Inquiry into Reductionism"). Mr. Ball was awarded a CRRAR student research fellowship for the Winter 2011 term and subsequently presented a paper to the fellows entitled "Are Fallacies Vices?" Upon being accepted to the Philosophy MA program at Windsor, Mr. Ball was awarded an International Graduate Student Scholarship. Currently, he is in PhD studies at the University of Alberta where he holds a four-year scholarship awarded by the university.

Katharina von Radziewsky

Ms. von Radziewsky completed her Masters degree in philosophy during the academic year of 2010/2011 at the University of Windsor. Her Major Paper was advised by Dr. Tindale and titled: "Pulling Strings: How Rethoric can Deal with Subjectivity in Argumentation". While here she presented at the Graduate Student Conference in Windsor. Shortly after she returned to Germany, she presented at the Argumentation-Theory-Conference "Analyzing (real) Arguments" in Hamburg. Ms. von Radziewsky received her doctorate in philosophy from McMaster University in 2016.  Currently she holds the Ronald Dworkin postdoctoral fellowship in legal philosophy at New York University.  Starting in 2017, she will be assistant professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Lethbridge.

Michael Baumtrog

Mr. Baumtrog (Bommer) completed his BA (H) in Philosophy in 2008 and his MA in Philosophy in 2011, both at the University of Windsor.  He presented papers at two consecutive graduate conferences at the University of Windsor as well as the Southeast Philosophy Congress in Morrow, Georgia, USA. Bommer is currently a PhD student at the New University of Lisbon in Portugal where he is conducting research on international political argumentation.

Michael Walschots

Mr. Walschots completed his B.A. (H) at the University of Windsor in 2009, and is scheduled to complete his M.A. in Philosophy in the Fall of 2011. His M.A. thesis is advised by Dr. Deborah Cook and is entitled ‘Adorno’s ‘Addendum’ to Practical Reason’. During his M.A. degree Mr. Walschots has presented papers on various topics at the 15th Annual Graduate Legal Theory Conference at UBC in Vancouver, Canada; at the Southeast Philosophy Congress in Morrow, Georgia, USA; the University of Windsor’s Graduate Philosophy conference; the 9th meeting of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation; the 4th Critical Theory and Social Justice Conference in Rome, Italy; and the meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He received a Master’s SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship as well as SSHRC Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement, with which he spent 5 months studying in Frankfurt, Germany. Mr. Walschots has also been awarded a three-year SSHRC Doctoral Canada Graduate Scholarship, which he will be using at the University of Western Ontario in order to study Kant’s legal philosophy starting in September 2011.  Mr. Walschots received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Western University in 2015.  He is currently SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at St. Andrews University in Scotland.

Khameiel Al Tamimi

Ms. Al Tamimi came into the MA program with a broad interest in Epistemology that she turned toward argumentation and feminist epistemology .  She presented "Feminist Alternatives to Traditional Argumentation" at the June 2009 conference on Argumentation Cultures and it will be published in the proceedings.  Ms. Tamimi is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy at York University.  

Martin Crozier

Mr. Crozier graduated with an MA in Philosophy in 2009 complementig his MS in Biology from Wayne State University.   Martin is currently working on a Ph.D. in Biology at the University of Windsor.

Neil Langshaw

Mr. Langshaw completed his MA, with thesis: “Weighing the Balance: An Examination of and Possible Justification for Euthanasia”, at the University of Windsor in October 2008 under the supervision of Dr. Rose.  He is pleased to have presented at two successive ‘Essays of Significance’ graduate student conferences. Mr. Langshaw is currently in the PhD program at the University of Guelph."

Patrick Bondy

Mr. Bondy completed his MA at the University of Windsor in August 2008. He completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy at McMaster University in August 2012.  His dissertation, A Philosophical Examination of the Instrumental Conception of the Epistemic Rationality of Human Doxastic States, is available at http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/7297. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University from 2013 to 2015. Bondy’s position is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Dr. Bondy will be joining the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in the summer of 2015, as a Visiting Research Fellow. He organized a workshop at Cornell on the Ethics of Belief in November 2014, and is currently guest editing a special issue of Logos and Episteme on that same topic. He has six journal articles either published or forthcoming, in Informal Logic, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Episteme, Logos and Episteme, and Philosophia, and he has presented his research at more than twenty venues in Canada, the United States, and the UK and Europe. He has also won the essay prize of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT) twice: once in 2014, with a paper titled "Virtues, Evidence, and Ad Hominem Arguments," and once in 2009, when he was co-recipient of the prize, with a paper titled "Truth and Argument Evaluation."

Jeffrey Renaud

Mr. Renaud completed his MA studies at the University of Windsor in August 2008. He was recently awarded his second OGS award.  He presented a paper entitled, "This Body, This Civilization, This Repression: Marcuse’s Sexual Theory and the Ongoing Relevance of Negative Thinking" at the Re-Thinking the Frankfurt School conference. The paper was published in Strategies of Critique (2008).  Mr. Renaud is currently in the PhD program at the University of Ottawa.

Amy Butchart

Ms. Butchart’s (2008) major paper, “Agency Within Androcentric Discourse: The Critical Role of Marginalized Voices in the Medical Sciences”, explores the ubiquitous use of a male norm in the medical sciences. Dr. Butchart completed her PhD at the University of Guelph Spring of 2014. Her doctoral thesis, "Anatomy and Culture: A New Feminist Methodology", outlines an approach to studying the body—in particular the body suffering from eating disorders—that is able to adequately capture the complex relationship that exists between the physiological and neurological body and the social and cultural discourses that shape our understanding of the body. She has presented work at several academic conferences, and published "Resources for Research on Analogy: a Multi-disciplinary Guide" together with Marcello Guarini, Paul Simard-Smith, and Andrei Moldovan (Informal Logic 29(2), 2009). Dr. Butchart has tried to combine her academic research with her desire to improve the health and lives of Canadians. She currently teaches in the Women’s Studies department at the University of Guelph. She was part of the 2010 Canadian Institute of Health Research Summer Institute on Gender and Health. She has also volunteered at Homewood Health Care Centre in Guelph in horticulture therapy working with individuals suffering from eating disorders.

Andrei Moldovan

Mr. Moldovan completed his MA at Windsor in 2007 with the assistance of a University of Windsor International Graduate Student Scholarship. During Winter 2007, he was awarded the John and Anne Cristescu Memorial Scholarship. Since 2009 he has taught philosophy of language at the University of Salamanca, Spain, and Dr. Moldovan obtained his PhD at the University of Barcelona in 2015 with a thesis on the semantics of definite descriptions. He received the 2009 Blair Prize from the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation for the paper "Pragmatic Considerations in the Interpretation of Denying the Antecedent", and together with Paul Simard-Smith received in again in 2011 for their paper "Arguments as Abstract Objects". Both papers were published in Informal Logic. Other publications include "Carnap’s External Questions and  Semantic Externalism", Prolegomena (13(2), 2014) and "Arguments, Implicatures and Argumentative Implicatures", in Inside Arguments: Logic And The Study Of Argumentation (2012, Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Paul Simard Smith

Mr. Simard Smith thinks back fondly to the interesting and enthusiastic conversations at the Windsor Philosophy Club while working toward the completion of his MA here in 2007. After finishing his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, Logic In Context: An Essay on the Contextual Foundations of Logical Pluralism, he taught at Campion College and the University of Regina in Saskatchewan for a year. Dr. Simard-Smith received a two year SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Post-doctoral Fellowship to study logical pluralism and its implications for certain issues in epistemology, philosophy of language, argumentation theory, and metaphysics at the University of Connecticut. He co-authored, "Resources for Research on Analogy: a Multi-disciplinary Guide." Informal Logic, 29, no. 2, pp. 84-197 with Dr. Marcello Guarini. With Andrei Moldovan also in Informal Logic he published "Arguments as Abstract Objects" and a publication with Rachel McKinnon in Philosophia, titled "Sure the Emperor Has No Clothes But You Shouldn't Say That.”

Brandon Fenton

Mr. Fenton completed his MA in philosophy during the spring/summer of 2007.  A paper based on his MA thesis has been accepted and presented at three different referreed conferences, including the New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics conference in Cardiff, Wales, UK (August of 2007). His MA thesis was published as a book in 2008, Character and Concept: How Conceptual Blending Constrains Situationism. Mr. Fenton received his Ph.D. in philosophy from York University in 2014.  Currently he is adjunct professor in philosophy at York University.

Ryan Tonkens

While an MA student at the University of Windsor, Dr. Tonkens made numerous conference presentations and published "Fodor versus Pinker: A Critical Analysis of a Debate over How the Mind Works" (based on a term paper) in De Philosophia, and "A Reply to Cholbi's Suicide Intervention and Non-Ideal Kantian Theory" (based on his MA thesis) in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.  After graduating from Windsor, he went on to complete (2012) a Ph.D. at York University.  In the process he won the International Association for Computing and Philosophy Goldberg award for graduate students and published several more papers.  Dr. Tonkens completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Novel Tech Ethics at Dalhousie University (Faculty of Medicine), and begins a 3-year faculty position at Monash University (Australia) in 2013.

Erin Ward

Curtis Hyra