I’m an American ex-pat living and working in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. I have a PhD, which probably suggests that I think too much, read too often, and exercise too little. Furthermore, I’ll openly admit: I have my fair share of concerns.
The global financial crisis of 2007-08 fundamentally altered my sense of reality and I must confess I’ve been stupefied ever since. As if that maelstrom wasn’t enough, I–or rather, we–must now learn to live not only within the uncertain shadows cast by the Great Acceleration, the sixth mass extinction, and the new, human-induced climate regime, but also by the deeply disconcerting knowledge that human activities are responsible for ushering in an entirely new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Taken collectively, these harrowing events underscore a deeply pressing need to reimagine the world. This work must be done by everyone. Although not entirely dedicated to this task, parts of this website constitute a modest attempt to contribute to that collective and urgent reimagination.
My past professional activities have followed the contours of more traditional scholarly activities such as teaching, researching, publishing, and presenting, but starting in late 2025 my intent is to take my creative and professional energies in some new directions. In this work I aim to bring together disciplines that might normally be considered strange bedfellows (pedagogy and gastronomy, for example). We left normal long ago, however, so I enthusiastically alchemize such disciplines for the explicit purpose of breathing new life–as well as new pleasures–into educational practices and environments.
In Autumn 2025 I published the first pre-issues of Dear Bruno, an earnest-but-modest (free!) monthly Substack newsletter determined to elicit a pedagogical dimension from the work of Bruno Latour, a highly influential–yet frequently misunderstood–French philosopher and anthropologist of science who sought to revolutionize our contemporary ideas about science, society, nature, modernity, and more. Sadly, Monsieur/Professeur Latour passed away in October 2022.
In Summer 2026 I aim to debut a second passion project tentatively titled Pedagogy at the End (of an Epoch), a 3-part series of semi-provocative, semi-performative, in-person public service announcements for English-speaking educators and administrators. In these PSAs, I argue for the urgent development of a new suite of pedagogies attending to the scope and scale of a radically–and demonstrably–altered relationship between humans and the Earth. This alarming relationship is presently best captured by a term first suggested by a small working group of Earth Systems scientists back in 2000: the Anthropocene. My public service announcements amount to a plea for the immediate development of distinctly Anthropocene pedagogies for use throughout K-16 education, not only in science education, but in all school subjects.
What else to know about me?
Truth be told, I prefer noticing over counting, opening over closing, exploring over explaining, expanding over exhausting, and existence over essence. I also find great pleasure in photography. If I were to be reincarnated as another human I should like to be Bruno Latour or Anna Tsing. If my future destiny is to take a non-human form, well then let me be a European larch tree (Larix decidua) perched high in a remote valley somewhere in the European Alps or an arcus cloud formation lingering just off of the coast of Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes.
