Department of PhilosophyFor appointments please use my calendly page. [This is for in-person office hour appoinments only for Penn students.]
I’m Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy with a secondary appointment at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. I am also a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the 2023-2024 year, I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
I’m interested in how poverty and social class shape our agency. My book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility focuses on the ethical sacrifices that first-generation and low-income students make in pursuing upward mobility. It was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Education and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It was also selected as Princeton President Eisgruber’s Pre-Read for the Class of 2025. You can learn more at: Hidden Brain podcast, The Atlantic, Inside Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, New York Daily News, Times Higher Education,Princeton Alumni Weekly, Public Books, Forbes, and Vox.
I’ve received the American Philosophical Association’s Scheffler Prize for my work in the philsophy of education, my paper Reasoning Under Scarcity was award the Australasian Association of Philosophy‘s 2017 Best AJP Paper Award, and my paper Grit, cowritten with the brilliant Sarah Paul, was selected by the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy papers published in 2019.
Previously, I have held positions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the City College of New York, the Graduate Center-CUNY, and Swarthmore College. I received my Ph.D. from Stanford University and my A.B. from Princeton University. I’ve been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellow at the Princeton Center for Human Values. I’m an elected member-at-large of the American Philosophical Association’s Board.
I was born and grew up in Lima, Peru where I attended Colegio Franklin D. Roosevelt.
