Rachel is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities program. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Kenyon College in 2004, her master’s degree in the Humanities from The University of Chicago in 2009, and her PhD in Philosophy and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in 2022. Her doctoral dissertation, titled Spiritual Practice and the Patterns of Experience: Rethinking the Form of Moral Education, explored how ancient traditions of spiritual practice might inform a reconceptualization of the moral and formative dimensions of institutionalized education.
Rachel’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach to questions about the rhythms and patterns that shape human experience and the practices and institutions through which those rhythms and patterns are formed. She has published on the educational significance of poetic form in Heidegger’s essays and The Republic, the value of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for defending the humanities, Plato’s Laches as a paradigm for humanistic inquiry, reading as form of askēsis, and recasting moral education as a practice of virtue.