I'm an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. I'm also a fellow at St John's College. My core areas of research are philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. I also enjoy thinking and writing about philosophy of psychiatry.
Recently, I've been working on attention and salience. I'm interested in what we notice, and why, and in how we prioritize information. My book on this topic Priority and Prejudice: the Epistemology of Salience and Attention is coming out with OUP in late 2025. It offers a framework for evaluating salience and attention from an epistemic perspective. I introduce the concept of a salience structure, a network theoretic way of modelling our informational landscape, and I use that to gain an understanding of, among other things, ignorance, inquiry, and prejudice.
I am currently thinking and writing about forgetting, including collective forgetting. I've also been thinking about what a more radically social epistemology and philosophy of mind would look like.
Some of my other research is in philosophy of perception. I recently published a paper that argues that we can see modal properties - how things could be, as well as how they in fact are. I use that to develop an account of visual objects as bundles of modal properties. In the past I've written about the ways in which visual experience extends through and develops over time, and about perceptual uncertainty. I also work on bias: when is something a bias, and when is it just a case of legitimately learning from experience? Must problematic biases always involve false or unjustified beliefs? What can we learn from bias about the limits of epistemic evaluation?
Unfortunately, I do not currently have the capacity to take on more PhD students.
I'm also currently working on a collection of essays for a non-specialist audience on love and autonomy. My agent for that project is Lizzy Kremer at David Higham Associates.
Before coming to Cambridge in 2018 as a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, I was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at NYU for the 2017-2018 academic year. Before that, I completed my PhD at Yale University, and a BPhil in philosophy and a BA in classics and philosophy, both at Oxford University. I have also spent time undertaking legal training, and legal research focusing on capital punishment in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Email: jm2200[at]cam[dot]ac[dot]uk