Hi, I'm Becca. I'm an essayist, a literary critic, and a third-year PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard.
I write essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review for publications like The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, and more. I'm a two-time finalist for The National Book Critics Circle's book reviewing prize (2016 and 2018), and in 2017, I was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. My nominated essay "Ladies in Waiting," about women and waiting, is collected in the 2017 Best American Magazine Writing anthology, available here. You can read my interview with the National Book Critics Circle here. I write mostly about feminism and "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent. A few authors I especially love are Italo Svevo, Saul Bellow, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Julio Cortazar, Helen DeWitt, Marie de France, Simone Weil, William Gass, Antal Szerb, Norman Rush, and Javier Marias.
At Harvard, I think mostly about art, literature, beauty, and the relationship between aesthetic value and other types of value. In my second-year paper, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," I argued that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. (A draft is available upon request; I'm in the process of dramatically revising, and I welcome devastating objections.) I have strong secondary interests in feminism and 20th century continental philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger. I'm currently at work on a paper about whether it is possible to be a constitutivist about aesthetic value and a paper about how we might read Heidegger as an ethicist. I'm still in the process of figuring out what my dissertation will be about, but it may have to do with love, reasons, and sexism and racism in romantic preferences.
Before I began my PhD in the fall of 2016, I earned a first-class MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge, where I wrote a dissertation about the metaphysics of sickness. Before that, I served as assistant literary editor of The New Republic. Before that (!), I graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth in 2014 with a degree in philosophy & German (and an enduring distaste for fraternities). These days I live in Somerville MA but I go to New York a lot. I love RuPaul's Drag Race, punishingly long runs, and even the parts of Berlin that have become hopelessly lame.
I write essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review for publications like The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, and more. I'm a two-time finalist for The National Book Critics Circle's book reviewing prize (2016 and 2018), and in 2017, I was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. My nominated essay "Ladies in Waiting," about women and waiting, is collected in the 2017 Best American Magazine Writing anthology, available here. You can read my interview with the National Book Critics Circle here. I write mostly about feminism and "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent. A few authors I especially love are Italo Svevo, Saul Bellow, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Julio Cortazar, Helen DeWitt, Marie de France, Simone Weil, William Gass, Antal Szerb, Norman Rush, and Javier Marias.
At Harvard, I think mostly about art, literature, beauty, and the relationship between aesthetic value and other types of value. In my second-year paper, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," I argued that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. (A draft is available upon request; I'm in the process of dramatically revising, and I welcome devastating objections.) I have strong secondary interests in feminism and 20th century continental philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger. I'm currently at work on a paper about whether it is possible to be a constitutivist about aesthetic value and a paper about how we might read Heidegger as an ethicist. I'm still in the process of figuring out what my dissertation will be about, but it may have to do with love, reasons, and sexism and racism in romantic preferences.
Before I began my PhD in the fall of 2016, I earned a first-class MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge, where I wrote a dissertation about the metaphysics of sickness. Before that, I served as assistant literary editor of The New Republic. Before that (!), I graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth in 2014 with a degree in philosophy & German (and an enduring distaste for fraternities). These days I live in Somerville MA but I go to New York a lot. I love RuPaul's Drag Race, punishingly long runs, and even the parts of Berlin that have become hopelessly lame.
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