I’m Cara, a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Colorado College.

I graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of New Mexico after defending my dissertation “Bloody Rationality: The Dialectic of Modern Reason and Sacrifice in Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer” this past December 2023. My research mainly concerns “modern sacrifice”, or forms of instrumental bloodshed enacted in service of universal human ends, rather than divine ends. More broadly, my areas of research and teaching focus are 19th- and 20th-century European Philosophy (esp. Hegel), Social and Political Philosophy, Critical Theory (esp. Adorno), Feminist Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Indian Philosophy.

Currently, I am writing a chapter for an edited volume on the phenomenological and political role of sacrifice in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, an article on modern political sacrifice in Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer’s analyses of the Reign of Terror and the Holocaust, as well as an encyclopedia article on the genesis of the concept of “cunning” in Smith, Mandeville, Hegel, and Adorno, using former Congressman George Santos as a contemporary point of departure. 

Outside of teaching and individual research, I run an ongoing interdisciplinary research group called the California Ideology Project. We recently orchestrated a conference at UC Santa Cruz on “The California Ideology,” keynoted by Max Tomba, Banu Bargu, and Alberto Toscano, and we are compiling the conference proceedings for publication. I’m also the editor of the blog of the American Philosophical Association’s “Syllabus Showcase” series, and I’m completing a three-year term on the APA Graduate Student Council. You can read some of my work on my PhilPapers and Academia.edu pages, as well as an (old-ish) interview with me on the APA blog.