I am a Senior Research Scholar at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Complutense University of Madrid, with a 5-year "Ramón y Cajal" research grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science. Before that, I have been Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Philosophy Department of Emory University, where I have taught for more than 10 years (from 2011 to 2024). In Fall 2024 I will be teaching Philosophical Questions and Methods at the new School of Humanities of IE University as well.

My primary area of research is ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. My work focuses mainly on topics related to moral psychology, philosophy of action, theory of emotions, ethics and political thought in the ancient Greeks, and especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Cynics. I have broader research interests in contemporary ethics, emotion theory, action theory, virtue ethics, and social and political epistemology (with particular excitement about contemporary social epistemology and its intersections with core themes in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy). 

One of my central areas of interest is the epistemic, ethical, and political role of emotions. In my first book, Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good (Oxford University Press, 2020), I present and defend Aristotle’s view that shame is the moral emotion that guides us in the process of becoming good. I argue that despite shame’s bad reputation as a potential obstacle to the development of moral autonomy, this emotion actually plays a crucial positive role in making us receptive to arguments about the noble and the good.

My current book project, provisionally titled Aristotle on the Psychology of Justice: Greed, Envy, Self-Love, Friendship, and Equality, aims at finding a viable way of understanding the controversial Aristotelian notion of justice as a personal virtue and of explaining the emotional and motivational outlooks of the just and the unjust person. The provisional chapter titles are: 1. Greed and the Roots of Injustice; 2. Justice, Anger, and Revolution; 3. Is Righteous Indignation a Form of Proto-Justice?; 4. Emotions about Merit as the Seeds of Justice and Injustice: Envy, Nemesis, and Schadenfreude; 5. Political Friendship and Justice; and 6. Aristotle on Self-Love and Justice as a Personal Virtue.

I am also working on the intersection of ancient epistemology, ethics, and politics. One of my main interests is the role of experience (empeiria) in the ethical-political thought of Plato and Aristotle. Another big theme in my research is the ancient Greek notion of the noble (kalon): how we get to know it and value it, and why it is important as an alternative value different from the merely pleasant and the merely advantageous.

I did my PhD at the Collaborative Programme of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and I spent one year as a visiting student at the Program of Ancient Philosophy of the Humboldt University in Berlin. I studied my undergrad in philosophy at the UCM, and spent one year as an exchange student at the Institut für Philosophie of the Freie Universität in Berlin and another one at UCLA.

I have been María Zambrano Research Scholar at the Department "Filosofía y Sociedad" of the Complutense University of Madrid during 2022-24,  Fellow in Residence at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard during 2015-2016, and visiting scholar at the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford during the Michaelmas term of 2018. Since June 2022 I have been part of the research group “Normatividad, Emociones, Discurso y Sociedad” (GINEDIS) at the UCM in Madrid.

Last updated June 1, 2024