Current Research
My research explores modern and contemporary French and European thought—especially the stories and concepts through which we make sense of the human, the secular, and the natural world. A recurring focus is the social contract tradition (from Rousseau onward): how “origin stories” such as the state of nature function as tools of critique, and how ideas of freedom, trust, belonging, and the common good are reshaped under the pressures of ecological crisis, technological change, and cultural polarisation.
My work combines close reading with intellectual history and cultural analysis. Over time I have written on a range of major figures in continental philosophy and social theory, as well as on the points at which theology and contemporary thought intersect—sometimes explicitly, sometimes in the margins and metaphors of ostensibly secular texts.
Current Monograph Projects
The State of Nature and the Shaping of Modernity
Published by Cambridge University Press, this book argues that the modern “state of nature” is not just a speculative prehistory but a remarkably durable tool for cultural critique. It traces how state-of-nature stories continue to shape debates about freedom and equality, colonialism and secularity, and our relationship to the non-human world. (You can follow related writing and updates here.)
The Social Contract and the Common Good in Modernity
From 2021–2025 I held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship on “Rewriting the Social Contract: Technology, Ecology, Extremism,” examining how social contracts function not only as stories about origins but as instruments for diagnosing fracture and imagining repair. Building on that work, my current research explores the notion of the common good in modernity: what it has meant historically, why it becomes contested, and how it is pressured and reconfigured in a world shaped by ecological limits, rapidly diffusing technologies, and a changing public square. (For project resources and events, see the Monash Social Contract Research Network, and my ongoing writing here.)
Graduate Supervision
Supervising Masters and doctoral projects is one of the real joys of my job, and I’m always happy to hear from prospective graduate students whose interests overlap with mine. I supervise widely in contemporary European literature, philosophy, theology, film, and intellectual history, and I welcome inquiries on social contract traditions, secularity and atheism, liberation and emancipation, philosophical understandings of the human being, and Michel Serres’s thought.