Personal.  I was born in 1986 in northern Minnesota.  I moved states with my mom when I was 14, and attended public high school and college in Iowa City, a liberal sanctuary in the Midwest; to the right is a picture of me there as a high school senior in 2003.  As an undergraduate, I lived in the basement of a bookshop, and I worked in several bookshops, the Iowa Law Library, a Procter & Gamble factory, and the Iowa Law, Health Policy, and Disability Center.  I then moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey in 2008 for graduate school at Rutgers, which gave me a great philosophical ancestry.  Whenever I wasn’t working on philosophy, I took the train to New York City.  Since 2014 I’ve lived in Southampton, England.

​​My brilliant and wonderful wife Kate Sylvan is a dual UK/American citizen who was born in Southampton.  Last September, we were thrilled to bring home our first baby, Edward ('Teddy') Felix Sylvan.   Although Teddy instantly became the most beloved little fellow in the household, we have been trying our best to reassure our poor cat Seneca that he remains our favorite non-human animal.  

Stay tuned for updates and new pictures.  Teddy has just started to walk reliably, and has also learned essential words like 'cat', 'book', 'cracker', 'tree', and 'light', albeit in rather peculiar and at best approximate pronunciations (e.g., the stronger examples include 'quaqua' or just 'quah' for cracker).