Skip to main content

Home

About me

I am an Associate Professor of logic and philosophy of language and Director of Liberal Arts at Durham University by day and a writer of speculative fiction by night.

I have a number of academic research interests. In logic, my focus is in the realm of formal modeling and interactive logic. My work brings togther tools and techniques from modern logic and artificial intelligence to help explore and understand practices of reasoning and argumentation in historical contexts. My personal research is primarily focused on developments in medieval Western Europe, particularly in medieval theories of obligationes, but I am also interested in the development of logic within the epistemological and debate traditions in Buddhist India and Tibet. In philosophy of language, I am interested in questions of meaningfulness that go beyond the standard issues of the meaning of natural languages, especially the unique issues of meaning that fiction, and especially fanfiction, pose.

For teaching purposes, I am currently writing a logic textbook, What is Logic?. I have an associated youtube channel that covers the material in this book in short video format: What is Logic?.

I am also the Editor-in-Chief and Principal Investigator of the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources. I served as an Associate Editor of Journal of Logic, Language, and Information from 2013 to 2020, and I am the vice-president of the British Logic Colloquium).

Outside of academia, in addition to my fiction writing, I am the principal organizer of SFFReviews.com, a site for short reviews of short science fiction & fantasy stories. I have also done occasional TV & radio appearances:

  • “The Current”, CBC Radio, 17 April 2018 — listen online (starts around 38:00), or read an adapted version.
  • “ITV News At Ten”, ITV, 16 April 2018 — watch online.
  • “Hannah’s Bookshelf”, North Manchester FM, 106.6FM, 16 September 2017 — listen online.
  • “Alfie and Charlie at Breakfast”, BBC Radio Newcastle, 95.4FM, 19 August 2016 — listen online (starts around 2:40:00).
  • “Jonathan Miles”, BBC Radio Newcastle, 95.4FM, 10 March 2015 — listen online (starts ~10 min. in).