About Me

I am married to the lovely and talented Kristin Mickelson and am the father of two great kids, Leo and Anna. We have two dogs and two cats. 

I grew up in Youngstown, OH. My four grandparents migrated there from Greece (Kalymnos and Samos) in the 1910s. My father was a millwright and my mother kept the household running and cared for six children, one of whom was severely disabled. My educational journey was circuitous and ill-advised at many points, but eventually I figured out I wanted to be a philosophy professor, and I was hired by University of Minnesota Morris as an Assistant Professor in 2009. 

Philosophically, I never seemed to fit into the existing categories, so I had to blaze my own trail. I wrote what I think was the first dissertation on honor in analytic philosophy, where I coined the term "honor ethics" because honor wasn't yet a topic. I tried to make honor a thing early in my career, but a combination of factors scuttled that effort, chief among them being poor networking among honor researchers (despite my best efforts) and the rise of wokeness, which sucked up all the oxygen in ethics and social/political philosophy— especially for something as masculine-coded as honor. Although I'd reframe/revise a few theoretical points if I were writing on honor today, I'm proud of the work I did in those years, and many extremely fruitful ideas and lines of inquiry remain yet to be developed. 

Since about 2017 I've focused on more timely topics that I feel I can make a unique contribution to. I find that lots of vaguely conservative/rightist positions don't get a say and, when they do, are argued in liberal/progressive terms. Whenever I write, I try to dig deep and figure out the real motivation for my position. I excavate and represent that in my arguments, and I believe this practice helps readers better understand a moral psychology that academic philosophy has done a lot to exclude, ignore, and silence. 

I love learning about other cultures and traveling to exotic places. Travel to (and sometimes working in) the Middle East, Asia, South America, and especially Africa has been transformative for me, and has given me a much better sense of the average human. Lessons I've learned there and in my hometown on family structure, gender and sexual norms, religious psychology, taboo, cohesion, and social trust are a constant meditation of mine and pop up with increasing frequency in my work.