Last Updated: July 2025
Welcome to my personal website. Here you’ll find information about me, my work, and my interests.
As of Fall 2022, I am pursuing a second PhD in Information, with a focus on virtual reality (VR), at the University of Arizona’s College of Information Science. I received my first PhD in Philosophy from the University of Miami in Fall 2014. Between Fall 2014 and Spring 2022, I was a tenure-track assistant then associate professor at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon. I decided to leave my position in 2022 because of the degrading political situation in Lebanon, and because I had decided to seriously learn how to design for VR.
In philosophy I have three main research areas: the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of technology, and the early 20th century phenomenological movement. All three areas also feed into my current empirical work with VR.
In the philosophy of mind, my primary focus is perception. I defend a version of naive realism, the view that perceptual experiences are relations to worldly objects. I do this by focusing on misperception, and in particular hallucinations, which are in tension with naive realism. Rather than appealing to a disjunctive view of perceptual experience, I argue for a non-disjunctive account on which hallucinations are closely related to picture perception. I’m now completing a monograph that offers new details, arguments, and empirical support for non-disjunctive naive realism.
As part of the generation that saw the introduction of home computers, video games, and the internet, I spent a lot of time in the virtual world. Many technological developments interest me, but I am particularly fascinated by VR given my interest in perception. I’ve written on the ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics of VR and video games, as well as the perception and metaphysics of virtual items. In this new PhD I’ve also learned to design virtual environments, VR video, and video games (see my itch.io page for more). My main interests are VR art, world-design, human-computer interaction, and computer graphics, particularly shaders. My upcoming dissertation is on VR-induced hallucinations, but I also have side projects on VR and education. At the Lebanese American University I had helped prepare a VR lab as part of a USAID grant between 2018 and 2022, and at the University of Arizona I’ve recently designed a new course on VR ethics.
I’m also interested in Phenomenology, which informs my work alongside Analytic philosophy. At the Lebanese American University I taught phenomenology courses, from Husserl to Levinas, and occasionally contemporary phenomenology. I have a particular research interest in Emmanuel Levinas, whose work remains largely unknown in analytic philosophy, but which I find insightful. My plan is to write a book on Totality & Infinity one day.
When I’m not doing philosophy or building something for VR, I spend my time with either art or activism. Between 2015 and 2019 I was part of Beirut Madinati, a grass-roots political group in Beirut that ran for municipal then parliamentary elections. Its priorities included environmentally sustainable development, equality for women and other marginalized groups, religious coexistence, political transparency, and accountability. Having left Beirut l now spend more time with movies, video games, paintings, ballroom dancing, and karate.
