I am a professor in the Philosophy Department at U Mass Boston, in Boston Massachusetts, where I have taught since September 1993. Before that, I was a professor at UNC Chapel Hill, and in 2004-2005 I visited at Wellesley College.  My research interests include issues in philosophy of language, particularly in the politics of discourse and the ways that linguistic practices influence or shape social justice or facilitate injustice. I have written on articles on metaphor, hate speech, racist discourse, apology, storytelling, feminist issues in philosophy of language, including but not limited to pornography, and a little bit about Nietzsche. Most recently, I have been working on questions about the power of linguistic practice to shape social conditions that make genocide possible, with a special focus on the Rwandan Genocide of the Tutsi in 1994. I’m very excited about a collaborative project I am doing with Alisa Carse, of Georgetown, on forgiveness and reconciliation.

A 2014 Profile of me, on the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Women is here.