Michaela Tiller Fairbanks Humanities Visiting Scholar-in-Residence
Bio
PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020
MA, UNC Chapel Hill, 2016
BA, Harvard College, 2012
Areas of Expertise
Early modern (17th and 18th century) philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, ancient and medieval philosophy, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology
Courses I Teach:
- PH 103: Philosophy and the Good Life
- PH 207: Philosophy of Religion
- PH 321: Early Modern Philosophy
- PH 329 Modern Author/Text
- HU 102: The Modernizing World
"I love philosophy as a discipline which allows us to think about thinking. Since everyone has beliefs and commitments, the topics which we discuss are relevant to everyone's lived experience. My greatest joy in teaching is bringing life to texts and the figures who wrote them so that students can directly engage as thinkers even across the centuries."
Current Research
The figures I work on are Catharine Trotter Cockburn, John Locke, Nicolas Malebranche, Margaret Cavendish and Zera Yacob. Papers in progress or talks I have given recently are on: Trotter Cockburn and Yacob on religious tolerance and its limits, Locke on the subjectivity of sensitive knowledge, and comparing causal accounts by Malebranche and Cavendish.
Recent News
At the 2023 meeting of the Creighton Club, I commentated on Georges Dicker’s paper ‘Locke: Soft Determinist or Libertarian?’
I was a participant in the 2023 Summer Program by the Center for Canon Expansion and Change at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. 20 scholars of early modern philosophy completed the second iteration of their annual colloquium to diversify curricula and to benefit from each other’s research on marginalized figures of the era.