Who am I?
Brianna Larson | Philosophy Ph.D. Student
Hi! I'm Brianna, but my friends call me Bri.
I grew up in rural Iowa, where I lived for most of my childhood. After high school, I moved to Omaha, Nebraska, and worked in the music industry for eight years as a bouncer/head of security (yes, really), bartender, show runner, and "merch girl". In addition to this, I co-produced a theme camp at Burning Man for two years. In 2019 I learned that philosophy still existed, and didn't die out with Plato and Aristotle. I enrolled in a community college soon thereafter with the intention to transfer to a four-year university to study Philosophy after completing my general education requirements. To learn more about my academic journey, scroll down.
When I was growing up, no 'traditional' career paths appealed to me. All I knew was that I wanted to help others, learn, and be around art. Philosophy, it seems, ticks all of those boxes.
Outside of academia, I enjoy running, cooking, traveling, the outdoors, art, and being of service to others.
The picture on the left is Burrito. I found Burrito on the street outside of my job, and now he lives with me. Thanks for helping me catch him, Dan.
The picture on the right is me and my younger brother, Carter.
Before coming to Cincinnati, I lived in Omaha, Nebraska, where I received my BA in Philosophy from the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) with a concentration in ethics, law, and social-political philosophy and a minor in human rights. I engaged in research at UNO and as a research assistant for one summer in the Religion and Philosophy Department. I was also the founder and President of the Philosophy Club, which emphasized uplifting underrepresented voices.
The projects I worked on while at UNO were interdisciplinary, fusing studies in feminism, ethics, cognitive science, psychology, and the philosophy of mind. I worked on three projects during my undergraduate career, which all covered special topics in social epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of emotion, selfhood and self-knowledge, and the philosophy of science.
This is me and my little sister during COVID. We were bored and stuck in the middle-of-no-where Iowa. As such, we decided to do a "Euphoria Inspired" photoshoot.
Before Cincinnati...
At UNO, I focused on three projects. One project, Schematic Interfaces and Social Expectations, is published in an undergraduate journal from the University of Iowa.
The other project, A Defense of Graded Access Consciousness, argues that instead of thinking of consciousness as an all-or-nothing phenomenon, we should think of it as graded. In this work, I interact with empirical studies in blindsight and philosophical work in attention, consciousness, introspection, perception, and the philosophy of emotion. By making a modification to the attentional spotlight in Bernard Baars’ Global Workspace theory and applying it to a scenario in Daniel Haybron’s Paper “Do We Know How Happy We Are”, I show an example of the modified spotlight in action. This project was accepted to the 22nd Annual Southern Appalachian Undergraduate Philosophy Conference at the University of North Carolina - Asheville where it received a second-place award.
The final project, Narrative and Well-Being, interacts with literature in the philosophy of psychiatry, philosophical psychology, the philosophy of mind, and studies on affective introspection and personal identity. In addition to this research, I participated in the Center for the Philosophy of Science's undergraduate summer program at the University of Pittsburgh which sparked my interest in the philosophy of science.
