Personal Statement
Before moving to Liverpool in 2023, Tom taught philosophy, critical theory, and cultural studies for ten years at the University of Brighton. Much of his published work has centred around the theoretical writings of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, the philosophy of Gillian Rose, and conceptions of modernity. He is currently working on the ERC-selected and UKRI-funded Advanced Research Grant ‘Kantian Justice: A Responsibility-Enhancing Desert-Sensitive Theory’, which is led by https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/sorin-baiasuProfessor Sorin Baiasu (details of the project can be found herehere). Alongside the ideas concerning justice and desert pursued by that project, his broader interests include aesthetics, political philosophy, Marxism, critical theory, cultural studies, and visual culture.

Research Overview
Much of my published research has concerned the philosophical dimensions of Guy Debord’s theory of ‘spectacular’ society. In Debord, Time and Spectacle (Haymarket, 2018), I developed a reconstruction of his work’s roots in French Hegelianism and Hegelian Marxism, and foregrounded the importance of his ideas about time and history. Following the publication of that book, I became interested in conceptions and critiques of modernity, and in related views concerning the contested legacies of the Enlightenment. That brought me to Gillian Rose’s philosophy, and to the latter’s potential relevance to philosophy of history and intellectual history. I remain very interested in Rose’s ideas about history, her related ideas about justice, and indeed in critical approaches to modernity more broadly (I am producing an edited collection for Routledge on the latter topic), but my current research focusses on distributive justice and notions of desert.

Since May 2025, I have been working with https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/sorin-baiasuProfessor Sorin Baiasu on the ERC-selected and UKRI-funded Advanced Research Grant ‘Kantian Justice: A Responsibility-Enhancing Desert-Sensitive Theory’ (details can be found https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/research/research-projects/kantian-justice/here). This project will develop a new model of distributive justice able to respond to economic disparities. It pursues the critical and contestatory dimensions of the concept of desert – the aspects thereof that lead to challenging elements of the status quo through the identification of social and economic injustices that demand redress – and in doing so, it aims to develop a position that differs from more straight-forwardly egalitarian approaches in political philosophy. My work on the project involves addressing three questions concerning desert: 1) the possible incompatibility of different conceptions of desert; 2) the plurality of values that govern desert claims; and 3) its practicability.